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ADVANCED INSAR FOR PERMAFROST RELATED GROUND MOTION
Session: GIS and Remote Sensing in Cold Regions / SIG et télédétection en régions nordiques
Bernhard Rabus, 3vGEOMATICS; SFU (Canada)
Jon Leighton, 3vGEOMATICS (Canada)
Alex LeFort, 3vGEOMATICS (Canada)
Colin Avey, Centre for Geomatics (Canada)
Monitoring permafrost with InSAR is well established with 3vGeomatics alone having operational projects with over 20 affected communities. However, the Arctic environment is uniquely challenging for InSAR, due to winter snow cover, and summer fluctuations of surface water diminishing InSAR quality, as well as seasonal dynamics of the active layer causing temporally non-linear motion. This study focuses on Inuvik, in Canada’s Northwest Territories, which presents the largest challenge to InSAR processing of the communities monitored. Traditional InSAR methods did not yield useful results here. In addition to the problems above, vegetation (also diminishing InSAR quality) is more abundant here, and Inuvik is also too small to rely solely on buildings for stable targets. However, an exceptional dataset of 42 very high resolution RADARSAT-2 Spotlight images provided a unique opportunity to develop a new InSAR solution to monitor ground motion in the Arctic. Several new methods: temporary target selection, advanced atmospheric error correction, and spatio-temporal adaptive filtering combined with parametric modeling of the active layer dynamics, have been developed to enhance our existing InSAR processing solution. We discuss the enhgancements and show preliminary results demonstrating significant improvement. The enhanced InSAR solution is generally applicable to all Arctic sites.
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