Map and Quantify the Ground Deformation Around Salt Lake in Hoh Xil, Qinghai-Tibet Plateau Using Time-Series InSAR From 2006 to 2018

Abstract

After the bursting of the Zhuonai Lake in Hoh Xil, Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP) in 2011, the water area and level of the Salt Lake increased rapidly. The lake area expanding would accelerate the melting of permafrost and contribute to many severe environmental issues, including the surface deformation around the lake. In this paper, we retrieve the deformation of permafrost area around the Salt Lake using time-series InSAR method with ENVISAT and Sentinel-1A images from October 2006 to December 2018. In order to get more measurement points, the distributed scatterers (DS) were utilized. Moreover, a deformation model combining two components: long-term linear deformation and seasonal deformation related with temperature, was adopted in the InSAR processing. The experimental results show that before the outburst of The Zhuonai Lake, the ground deformation was not obvious, with the mean deformation rate of-5 to 5 mm•year-1 from the ENVISAT results. From 2014 to 2018, the ground deformation around the Salt Lake gradually increased, with the maximum deformation rate over-25 mm•year-1. The water area and water level of Salt Lake were extracted based on the SAR amplitude images and Cryosat-2 radar altimeter data, showing a rapid increasing trend after 2017. The time-series displacement in the south of lake shows a high correlation with the lake level history. This study clearly illustrate that time-series InSAR could provide valuable information for monitoring potential hazards in permafrost region.

Mapping Invasive Aquatic Plants in Sentinel-2 Images Using Convolutional Neural Networks Trained With Spectral Indices

“…In [5], polar sea ice leads in open water were mapped. Water body extraction was carried out in [6], and permafrost areas were mapped in [7]. Many studies have been focused on mapping vegetation, i.e., estimating vegetation regions [8], monitoring vegetation growth [9] and vegetation changes [10], predicting the location of algal blooms [11], and discriminating between different macrophyte species [12], among other applications.…”

Evaluating Permafrost Degradation in the Tuotuo River Basin by MT-InSAR and LSTM Methods

“…Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometry (InSAR) is an efficient approach for investigating large-scale displacement of the permafrost. Multi-temporal InSAR (MT-InSAR) techniques, such as persistent scatterer interferometry (PSI) [ 13 ], and the Small BAseline Subset (SBAS) method [ 14 ], have been developed to monitor spatio-temporal seasonal freeze-thaw deformations and estimate the active layer thickness (ALT) of the permafrost on the QTP [ 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 ]. In these studies, deformation monitoring of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, the Qinghai-Tibet Highway, and their surrounding permafrost regions was carried out using multi-source SAR data and various MT-InSAR methods with different spatio-temporal scales.…”

“…In the application of InSAR technology to monitor the degradation trends of permafrost, some researchers have employed InSAR-derived time-series deformation to study the degradation trends of permafrost and permafrost distribution. Zhang et al [ 19 ] adopted multi-source SAR and optical remote sensing data to retrieve the deformation and water area of Salt Lake, showing that surrounding frozen soil has expanded at a rate of 20 mm every year since 2016. Lu et al [ 37 ] used Google Earth Engine and InSAR techniques to jointly analyze the Salt Lake expansion event and permafrost degradation on the QTP.…”

Temporal Consolidation Strategy for Ground-Based Image Displacement Time Series: Application to Glacier Monitoring

“…The latter is chosen when the variation of the studied surfaces' displacements is the variable of interest. As an example, satellite images can be used to monitor glaciers over a whole region of the world [2], or permafrost deformation in a specific area [3]. More closely, fixed digital cameras can also be used to monitor slope movements such as glaciers, rock glacier and landslides [4], [5], [6].…”