INTERFEROMETRIC SAR DEFORMATION MONITORING USING PASSIVE REFLECTORS AND ASCENDING AND DESCENDING PASSES

Abstract. The article concerns the estimation of land deformation in an area of copper mining using the Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI) technique and C-band data coming from the Sentinel-1 satellite. The aim of the work is a comparison of two different PSI approaches exploiting passive corner reflectors deployed pairwise, oriented towards the satellites in ascending and descending orbits. The comparison was done in the line of sight geometry. In addition, a validation was carried out using GNSS measurements. The results achieved using the two PSI approaches are consistent and mutually coherent. They are also congruent with observations from GNSS stations. These results proves that the method proposed to identify pixels on multi-looked images is correct. In addition, the intermediary results on the corner reflectors shows that their responses, in terms of dispersion of amplitude and the coherence, is slightly different. This needs to be further studied.