La técnica DInSAR: Bases y aplicación a la medición de subsidencias del terreno en la construcción

Abstract

Subsidences are defined as slow and gradual movements of the terrain or built surface. These may affect all types of terrains, and are caused by tension-induced changes for many reasons, such as lowering water tables (groundwater extraction), underground mining (minerals, coal, salt), excavation of tunnels, extraction of oil or gas, slow processes of dissolution and lixiviation of materials, consolidation of soft soils, organic soils,... The measurement and monitoring of land subsidences are the major components of infrastructures' auscultation in the construction and monitoring phases. In many cases, subsidences occur gradually and may be recognized before they cause damage in the works. The most common procedure for subsidence's control in engineering until now, is based on the use of instrumentation and methodologies for surveying such as precision levelling, inclinometers, photogrammetry, laser scanning and DGPS (Differential Global Positioning System). In the last decade a new technique is emerging, DInSAR (Differential Interferometry Synthetic Aperture Radar), which is based on the detection of small variations in altitude from the phase difference calculation between pairs of radar images (satellite's data acquired from active sensors in the microwave region) covering the same area of study. This article presents the evolution of this technique for measuring surface land subsidence and its application to various fields with satisfactory precision results. It presents a review on the use of DInSAR for monitoring and measuring subsidence of land and earth structures in Construction and in the fields of Geotechnics, Hydrology and Volcanology.