Time series analysis of very slow landslides in the three Gorges region through small baseline SAR offset tracking

Abstract

Sub-pixel offset tracking has been used in various applications, including measurements of glacier movement, earthquakes, landslides, etc., as a complementary method to time series InSAR. In this work, we explore the use of a small baseline subset (SBAS) Offset Tracking approach to monitor very slow landslides with centimetre-level annual displacement rate, and in challenging areas characterized by high humidity, dense vegetation cover, and steep slopes. This approach, herein referred to as SBAS Offset Tracking, is used to minimize temporal and spatial de-correlation in offset pairs, in order to achieve high density of reliable measurements. This approach is applied to a case study of the Tanjiahe landslide in the Three Gorges Region. Using the TerraSAR-X Staring Spotlight (TSX-ST) data, with sufficient density of observations, we estimate the precision of the SBAS offset tracking approach to be 2-3 cm on average. The results demonstrated accord well with corresponding GPS measurements.