Space-borne SAR Interferometry and Applications: Three Decades of Innovation and Problem Solving
With the global population surpassing 7.6 billion people in 2018, the impacts of human activities on the environment are noticeable almost everywhere on our planet. The consequences of these impacts are still elusive, particularly when trying to quantify them at larger scales. It is essential to trace environmental changes from a local to global scale over several decades. This task is increasingly fulfilled by Earth observation (EO) satellites, in particular, radar imaging instruments.
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), a cloud-penetrant microwave imaging system, provides unparalleled day-night and all-weather monitoring capabilities. Availability of repeated SAR acquisitions with similar imaging geometry allows performing interferometric SAR (InSAR) processing. InSAR uses radar to illuminate an area of the Earth’s surface and measures the change in distance between satellite and ground surface, as well as the returned signal strength. Such measurements are suitable for generating high-resolution digital elevation models and accurate terrain deformation maps.
While many multi-decadal EO datasets are already available, the major limitation hindering their effective exploitation in global change studies is the scarcity of tools and algorithms required for multitemporal high quality and efficient data processing at a fine spatial resolution. From a scientific perspective, there is a great demand to build up science-driven computational platforms that are transparent for their users and are diverse and flexible regarding the datasets and algorithms used. From a commercial perspective, timely access to precise measurements of the land surface change at high accuracy and resolution is vital. From a security perspective, an all-weather continuous monitoring system is ideal for various purposes such as object tracking and change detection
In this presentation, I will discuss some of the recent advances in the field of multitemporal InSAR processing, which enables us generating large-scale maps of land surface change with unprecedented accuracy and resolution. Next, I will show some of the innovative applications of such datasets for addressing different problems including; groundwater depletion in Central Valley California, earthquake hazards along San Andreas Fault, induced seismicity in the central U.S., and inundation hazard in major coastal cities of San Francisco, California and Huston, Texas due to relative sea level rise and hurricane. I will conclude my talk with new methods for estimating the groundwater loss and induced earthquake probability due to wastewater injection as well as new maps of inundation hazards for aforementioned coastal cities.