Extracting 3-D deformation fields from left- and right-looking InSAR with SM-VCE method: A case study of October 21, 2016 Central Tottori earthquake

Abstract

Three-dimensional (3-D) deformation fields with respect to the October 2016's central Tottori earthquake are extracted in this paper from ALOS-2 conducted Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) observations with four different incline angles, i.e., ascending/descending and left-/right-looking. In particular, the Strain Model and Variance Component Estimation (SM-VCE) method is developed to integrate the heterogeneous InSAR observations without being affected by the coverage inconformity of SAR images associated with the earthquake focal area. Compare with classical weighted least squares (WLS) method, SM-VCE method is capable for the retrieval of more accurate and complete deformation field of Central Tottori earthquake, as indicated by the comparison with the GNSS observations. In addition, accuracies of heterogeneous InSAR observations and 3-D deformations on each point are quantitatively provided by the SM-VCE method.