COMPARISON OF PSI AND DINSAR APPROACH FOR THE SUBSIDENCE MONITORING CAUSED BY COAL MINING EXPLOITATION

Abstract. Underground coal exploitation has its reflection in ground movements such as subsidence, sinking or shaking. These cause buildings and infrastructure damage, therefore it is important to measure the magnitude of deformation. Last decades, Differential Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (DInSAR) captured considerable attention as a tool for deformation monitoring. The results of conventional DInSAR, which utilizes two SAR images, are degraded due to atmospheric, topographic and orbital errors. To overcome these limitations, various stacking-based methods have been introduced. Therefore, the goal of presented study is to compare Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI) as stacking-based method with classical DInSAR for monitoring of subsidence caused by underground coal exploitation. Deformations in the areas of active mining exploitation are characterised typically by rapid non-linear movement. The comparison has been performed for the area of active exploitation in Rydułtowy mine located in Upper Silesian Coal Basin (USCB) in Poland. Results from two separate PSI and DInSAR processing portray similar deformation pattern over the study area. Unfortunately, due to the temporal decorrelation, PSI clearly demonstrate smaller information coverage in respect to DInSAR results. Additionally, due to the applied linear deformation model, PSI failed in displacement estimation with magnitude higher than 12 cm. In contrast, DInSAR thanks 6-day temporal baseline and no assumption for a deformation model, was able to capture the maximum magnitude of subsidence reaching 86 cm/year. However, these results are affected by atmospheric artefacts which in presented case study can reach even 14 cm/year. To achieve few cm level of accuracy and to estimate high deformation magnitude such as in presented study case (1m/year), integrated use of both InSAR techniques seems to be the reasonable solution.