COSMO-SkyMed Range Measurements for Displacement Monitoring Using Amplitude Persistent Scatterers

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite data are widely used to monitor deformation phenomena impacting the Earth's surface (e.g. landslides, glacier motions, subsidence, and volcano deformations) and infrastructures (e.g. bridges, dams, buildings). The analysis is generally performed using the Differential SAR Interferometry (DInSAR) technique that exploits the phase information of SAR data. However, this technique suffers for lack of coherence among the considered stack of images, and it can only be adopted to monitor slow deformation phenomena. In the field of geohazards monitoring and glacier melting, the Offset Tracking technique has been also widely investigated. This approach is based on the amplitude information only but it reaches worse accuracy compared to DInSAR. To overcome the limitations of DIn-SAR and Offset Tracking, in the last decade, a new technique called Imaging Geodesy has been investigated exploiting the amplitude information and the precise orbit of the modern SAR platforms (i.e. TerraSAR-X, COSMO-SkyMed). In this study, an investigation of using COSMO-SkyMed data for Earth surface monitoring was performed. The developed approach was applied to a set of imagery acquired over the Corvara (Northern Italy) area, which is affected by a fast landslide with yearly displacements up to meters. Specifically, two well identifiable and stable human-made Amplitude Persistent Scatterers (APSs) were considered to estimate the residual errors of COSMO-SkyMed sensor during the acquisition period between 2010 and 2015. Then, the same methodology was applied to estimate the displacement of a Corner Reflector (CR) located in the landslide area. Finally, the results were compared to the available GPS reference trend showing a good agreement.