Ground Subsidence in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Region from 1992 to 2014 Revealed by Multiple SAR Stacks

Abstract

Abstract:The coordinated development of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei has become a national strategy with Beijing and Tianjin as twin engines driving the regional development. However, the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region has suffered dramatic ground subsidence during last two to three decades, mainly due to long-term groundwater withdrawal. Although, annual spirit leveling has been conducted routinely in some parts of Beijing and Tianjin, and InSAR technique has also been used to monitor ground subsidence in some local areas of the region, there is a lack of a complete survey of ground subsidence over the whole region. In this paper, we report a research on mapping ground subsidence in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region over a long time span from 1992 to 2014. Three SAR datasets from four satellites are used: ERS-1/2 SAR images from 1992 to 2000, ENVISAT ASAR images from 2003 to 2010, and RADARSAT-2 images from 2012 to 2014. An improved multi-temporal InSAR method, namely "Multiple-master Coherent Target Small-Baseline InSAR" (MCTSB-InSAR), has been developed to process the datasets. A unique feature of MCTSB-InSAR is the adjustment process useful for wide area monitoring which provides an integrated solution for both calibration of InSAR-derived deformation and the harmonization of the deformation estimates from overlapping SAR frames. Three maps of the subsidence rate corresponding to the three periods over the wide Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region are generated, with respective accuracy of 8.7 mm/year (1992-2000), 4.7 mm/year (2003-2010), and 5.4 mm/year (2012-2014) validated by more than 120 leveling measurements. The spatial-temporal characteristics of the development of ground subsidence in Beijing and Tianjin are analyzed. This research represents a first-ever effort on mapping ground subsidence over very large area and over long time span in China. The result is of significance to serve the decision-making on ground subsidence mitigation in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region.

Wuhan Surface Subsidence Analysis in 2015–2016 Based on Sentinel-1A Data by SBAS-InSAR

“…Therefore, validation results suggest that SBAS InSAR-derived results agree well with results obtained by leveling data, and SBAS InSAR technique can successfully extract surface subsidence information in Wuhan using Sentinel-1A TOPS data with an accuracy of 6 mm/year. This accuracy is similar to the subsidence monitoring accuracies derived by Luo et al [47] and Zhang et al [48]. …”

Spatiotemporal Evolution of Land Subsidence in the Beijing Plain 2003–2015 Using Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI) with Multi-Source SAR Data

“…The mean deformation velocity mosaic of the three time spans is shown in Figure 3, respectively. In order to generate a long period information of cumulative deformation, the deformation rate in LOS has been projected into the up-down direction as subsidence rate by Equation (6) [33]:…”

Monitoring Building Deformation with InSAR: Experiments and Validation

“…In this study, the true displacement information for the two buildings is unknown. To validate the InSAR accuracy in buildings, classical leveling displacement with high precision was considered as the true deformation [33,34]. A statistical analysis of the difference between InSAR ($d_{insar}$) and leveling ($d_{level}$) was executed using the RMSE index of $\delta$.…”