EGU23-15190, updated on 12 Jul 2023

https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-15190
EGU General Assembly 2023
© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Synthetic aperture radar burst overlapped interferometry for the

analysis of large ground instabilities: Experiments in volcanic
regions.
Antonio Pepe, Andrea Barone, Pietro Mastro, Pietro Tizzani, and Raffaele Castaldo
National Council Research of Italy, IREA, Napoli, Italy (pepe.a@irea.cnr.it, barone.a@irea.cnr.it, mastro.m@irea.cnr.it,
tizzani.p@irea.cnr.it, castaldo.r@irea.cnr.it)

This work presents an overview of some applications of synthetic aperture radar (SAR)
interferometry technology for the detection and analysis of large ground displacements occurring
in volcanic areas, with the aim to retrieve the three-dimensional (3-D) ground displacement field
(up-down, east-west, north-south). Specifically, the work summarizes and investigates the
potential of Bursted Overlapped Interferometry (BOI) that properly combined can allow the
retrieval, at different scales of resolution and accuracies, of the north-south components of the
ground deformations, which are usually not available considering conventional SAR interferometry
techniques. In this context, the almost global coverage and the weekly revisit times of the
European Copernicus Sentinel-1 SAR sensors permit nowadays to perform extensive analyses with
the aim to assess the accuracy of the BOI techniques. More recently, Spectral Diversity (SD)
methods have been exploited for the fine co-registration of SAR data acquired with the Terrain
Observation with Progressive Scans (TOPS) mode. In this case, considering that TOPS acquires
images in a burst mode, there is an overlap region between consecutive bursts where the Doppler
frequency variations is large enough to allow estimating and compensating for, with great
accuracy, potential bursts co-registration errors. Additionally, and more importantly, in the case of
non-stationary scenarios, it allows detecting the ground displacements occurring along the
azimuthal directions (almost aligned along north-south) with centimeter accuracy. This is done by
computing the difference between the right and left interferograms, i.e., the burst overlapped
interferogram, and relating it to the ongoing deformation signals.

This work aims to apply the BOI technique in selected volcanic and seismic areas to evaluate the
impact of this novel technology for the analysis of quantifying, over small, covered regions, the
accumulated ground displacements in volcanic areas. In such regions, the interest is on
quantifying the accuracy of integrated BOI systems for the retrieval of 3-D displacements. To this
aim, we selected as a test site the Galapagos Island and we analyze with BOI the north-south
ground displacements. At the next EGU symposium, the results of the BOI analyses will be
presented, thus also providing comparative analyses with the results obtained from the use of
potential field method applied on the ground displacements in volcanic areas. More specifically, by
adopting this technique, we are able to estimate independently the north-south components of
the ground displacement by exploiting the harmonic properties of the elasticity field.
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