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Abstract:The Qinghai-Tibetan plateau (QTP), also known as the Third Pole and the World Water Tower, is the largest and highest plateau with distinct and competing surface and subsurface processes. It is covered by a large layer of discontinuous and sporadic alpine permafrost which has degraded 10% during the past few decades. The average active layer thickness (ALT) increase rate is approximately 7.5 cm·yr −1 from 1995 to 2007, based on soil temperature measurements from 10 borehole sites along Qinghai-Tibetan Highway, and approximately 6.3 cm·yr −1 , 2006-2010, using soil temperature profiles for 27 monitoring sites along Qinghai-Tibetan railway. In this study, we estimated the ALT and its AL thickening rate in the northern QTP near the railway using ALOS PALSAR L-band small baseline subset interferometric synthetic aperture radar (SBAS-InSAR) data observed land subsidence and the corresponding ALT modeling. The InSAR estimated ALT and AL thickening rate were validated with ground-based observations from the borehole site WD4 within our study region, indicating excellent agreement. We concluded that we have generated high spatial resolution (30 m) and spatially-varying ALT and AL thickening rates, [2007][2008][2009], over approximately an area of 150 km 2 of permafrost-covered region in the northern QTP.

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Existing studies have shown that satellite synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometry has two apparent drawbacks, i.e., temporal decorrelation and atmospheric contamination, in the application of deformation mapping. It is however possible to improve deformation analysis by tracking some natural or man-made objects with steady radar reflectivity, i.e., permanent scatterers (PS), in the frame of time series of SAR images acquired over the same area. For detecting land subsidence in Shanghai, China, this paper presents an attempt to explore an approach of PS-neighborhood networking SAR interferometry. With use of 26 ERS-1/2 SAR images acquired 1992 through 2002 over Shanghai, the analysis of subsiding process in time and space is performed on the basis of a strong network which is formed by connecting neighboring PSs according to a distance threshold. The linear and nonlinear subsidence, atmospheric effects as well as topographic errors can be separated effectively in this way. The subsidence velocity field in 10 years over Shanghai is also derived. It was found that the annual subsidence rates in the study area range from -2.1 to -0.6 cm/yr, and the averaged subsidence rate reaches -1.1 cm/yr.

The 12 November 2017 Mw 7.3 Sarpol Zahāb earthquake is one of the largest events to have occurred in the north-western Zagros fold-and-thrust belt during the instrumental period. We use teleseismic and synthetic aperture radar data to study the earthquake source parameters, rupture process and active tectonic characteristics of the event.We find that both data sets individually produce remarkably similar slip distribution, indicative of buried faulting that is consistent with the lack of significant surface rupture.Through the joint inversion of satellite radar and teleseismic data, we find that the rupture propagated rapidly (~3.2 km/s) and asymmetrically along strike to the south, but relatively slowly (~1.5 km/s) in the updip direction, and formed a single large-slip asperity with a peak slip value close to 5 m. Given the regional tectonic context of the distribution of known faults and lithologies, we suggest that the maximum slip is either located in the lowest sedimentary cover or the uppermost basement of the Mountain Front Fault.

The three-dimensional (3-D) deformation field associated with the 2016 Central Tottori earthquake is retrieved from advanced land observing satellite 2 interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) observations with four different viewing geometries, that is, ascending/descending tracks and left-/ right-looking modes. The strain model and variance component estimation (SM, VCE, SM-VCE) method is exploited and improved to integrate the InSAR observations with different viewing geometries so that the 3-D deformation field is not affected by the inconsistent coverage of SAR footprints or the gross errors in InSAR observations. The obtained results are consistent with GNSS observations, indicating that the improved SM-VCE method, known as SM-RVCE in this paper, is capable of retrieving an accurate and spatially complete 3-D deformation field for this earthquake. In addition, the precision of the InSAR observations and the estimated 3-D deformation are quantitatively assessed by the SM-RVCE method. Finally, on the basis of the estimated 3-D coseismic deformation, the source parameters of this event are inverted, revealing an asperity with a maximum strike-parallel slip of~1.1 m concentrated at depths between 2 and 10 km. The estimated seismic moment is 2.4 × 10 18 Nm, which corresponds to a Mw 6.2 event.