Deformation Monitoring Using Sentinel-1 SAR Data

Satellite earth observation enables the monitoring of different types of natural hazards, contributing to the mitigation of their fatal consequences. In this paper, satellite Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images are used to derive terrain deformation measurements. The images acquired with the ESA satellites Sentinel-1 are used. In order to fully exploit these images, two different approaches to Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI) are used, depending on the characteristics of the study area and the available images. The main processing steps of the two methods, i.e.; the simplified and the full PSI approach, are described and applied over an area of 7500 km2 located in Catalonia (Spain). The deformation velocity map and deformation time series are analysed in the last section of the paper.