Landslide displacement monitoring with split-bandwidth interferometry: A case study of the shuping landslide in the three gorges area

Abstract

Landslides constitute a major threat to people's lives and property in mountainous regions such, as in the Three Gorges area in China. Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (InSAR) with its wide coverage and unprecedented displacement measuring capabilities has been widely used in landslide monitoring. However, it is difficult to apply traditional InSAR techniques to investigate landslides having large deformation gradients or moving primarily in north-south direction. In this study, we propose a time series split-bandwidth interferometry (SBI) procedure to measure two dimensional (azimuth and range) displacements of the Shuping landslide in the Three Gorges area with 36 TerraSAR-X high resolution spotlight (HS) images acquired from February 2009 to April 2010. Since the phase based SBI procedure is sensitive to noise, we focused on extracting displacements of corner reflectors (CRs) installed on or surrounding the Shuping landslide. Our results agreed well with measurements obtained by the point-like targets offset tracking (PTOT) technique and in-situ GPS stations. Centimeter level accuracy could be achieved with SBI on CRs which shows great potential in futures studies on fast moving geohazards.