State-of-the-art of Land Deformation Monitoring Using Differential Sar Interferometry

In the last fifteen years the differential interferometric SAR, Synthetic Aperture Radar, (DInSAR) techniques have demonstrated their potential as land deformation measurement tools. In the last few years their capability has been considerably improved by using large stacks of SAR images acquired over the same area, instead of the classical two images used in the standard configurations. With these advances the DInSAR techniques are becoming more and more quantitative geodetic tools for deformation monitoring, rather than simple qualitative tools. The goal of the paper is to review the state-of-the-art of the spaceborne DInSAR-based land deformation monitoring. The airborne DInSAR is not considered in this work. The paper begins with a concise description of some basic DInSAR concepts, followed by a brief discussion of some important DInSAR applications. Then the state-of-the-art of DInSAR is analysed, by discussing few important technical issues, by addressing the issues of data and software availability, and by describing some relevant DInSAR results.