Multi-temporal landslide activity investigation by spaceborne SAR interferometry: Polish Carpathians case study

Abstract

Abstract. The main goal of this research is the activity state verification of existing landslide inventory maps using Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI). The study was conducted in Małopolskie municipality, a rural setting with a sparse urbanization in Polish Flysch Carpathians. PSI have been applied using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data from ALOS PALSAR, and Sentinel 1A/B from different acquisition geometry (ascending and descending orbit) to increase PS coverage and overcome geometric effects due to layover and shadowing. The Line-Of-Sight PSI measurements were projected to the steepest slope, which allows to homogenize the results from diverse acquisition modes and to compare displacement velocities with different slope orientations. Additionally, landslide intensity (motion rate) and expected damages maps were generated and verified during filed investigations. High correlation between PSI results and in-situ damage observations has been confirmed. Activity state and landslide-related expected damage map have been confirmed for 43 out of a total of 50 landslides investigated in the field. The short temporal baseline provided by Sentinel satellite 1A/B data allows increasing of the PS density significantly. The study substantiates usefulness of SAR based landslide activity monitoring for land use and land development, even in rural areas.

Review on the Use of Satellite-Based Radar Interferometry for Monitoring Mining Subsidence in Urban Areas and Demographic Indicators Assessment

“…The SBAS concentrates on distributed scatterers, as they are more sensible to temporal and volume decorrelation than PSs [23]. SBAS technique was used for mining subsidence monitoring in [12][13][14]20,28,54].…”

“…More than 65% of the studies on monitoring subsidence mining areas by InSAR techniques are focused on sites located in Europe. The European country with the highest number of studies on this topic is Poland, where coal mining [21,22,28,45,58] salt mining [26,47] and cooper mining [26,46,73] areas are presented. The intensive exploitation in the Upper Silesian Coal Basin crossing Poland is one of the reasons of this large number of studies, as half of the scientific contributions from Poland are on coal mining field.…”

“…In the subsidence study from Athens Basin, Greece, the type of mining is not specified [51]. Considering the exploitation mode, some of the scientific contributions refers to underground mining [14,16,24,25,28,35,46], or open pit [36,39,52,59,60]. Meanwhile, there are some mining areas where both underground and open pit exploitation are found, e.g.El Teniente, Chile [39,44].…”

“…salt mine in Poland [11][12][13]),  active mining sites (e.g. coal mine in Gardanne France [24], Rydultowy, Poland [28], Legnica Glogow Cooper Belt, Poland [46], New South Wales Australia coal mine [29,30], El Teniente, Chile [39,44], China [20,37,38,49])  mining sites with historical and active mines (e.g. Ruhr region, Germany [33])…”

“…One of the limitations of this technique is related to the presence of the atmospheric effect in the final result [23]. DInSAR was used for mining subsidence monitoring in [10,[24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38].…”