On the Use of the ISBAS Acronym in InSAR Applications. Comment on Vajedian, S.; Motagh, M.; Nilfouroushan, F. StaMPS Improvement for Deformation Analysis in Mountainous Regions: Implications for the Damavand Volcano and Mosha Fault in Alborz. Remote Sens. 2015, 7, 8323-8347

Vajedian et al. [1] present an improved method for the derivation of deformation parameters using satellite Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) data. The method is a modification of the Small Baseline Subset (SBAS) method as implemented in the StaMPS (Stanford Method for Persistent Scatterers) software. The modification includes many steps including the filtering of the differential interferograms, integration with GPS data and advanced phase unwrapping " to overcome a lot of short-and long-wavelength artifacts that are clearly visible in StaMPS results " (cf. [1], p. 8331). The authors refer to this new approach as the Improved SBAS, or ISBAS, method. Although the modified approach appears perfectly valid, the authors have unfortunately overlooked the fact that the ISBAS acronym is already well-established and has been used in over 20 publications since 2012, including journal papers, conference presentations and proceedings, abstracts, web pages and magazine articles. In these articles, ISBAS stands for " Intermittent SBAS " and, although it too is based upon a modification of the basic SBAS approach to differential interferometry, the similarity ends there. The Intermittent SBAS method was conceived to improve the coverage of the SBAS method over non-urban classes and therefore is not at all comparable to the contents of the Vajedian et al. paper. We offer a wide selection of references below [2–8], each of which clearly identifies the ISBAS acronym as Intermittent SBAS. The first peer-reviewed journal [2] in this instance was in 2013 and so the use of the acronym certainly predates the Vajedian et al. reference by at least two years.