Correcting ionospheric effects and monitoring two-dimensional displacement fields with multiple-aperture InSAR technology with application to the Yushu earthquake

Abstract

Differential synthetic aperture radar interferometry (D-InSAR) can only measure one-dimensional surface displacements along the line-of-sight (LOS) direction which greatly inhibits its development and application. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to measuring two-dimensional (2-D) surface displacements by exploiting a single InSAR pair, which is called multi-aperture InSAR (MAI) technology. We study the effects of baseline errors and the ionosphere on MAI technology and develop a directional filter and interpolator to minimize the ionospheric effects. A PALSAR image pair covering the 2010 Yushu earthquake is used to estimate the 2-D displacement fields of the earthquake using the MAI approach. The experimental results show that MAI is superior to conventional Offset-Tracking and therefore has great potential in co-seismic displacement measurement and source parameter inversion. © 2012 Science China Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.