Mitigation of atmospheric delay from InSAR processing

Abstract

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is capable of day/night and all-weather data acquisition, moreover, detection of centimeter-level deformation is achievable through InSAR processing. However, it was realized that InSAR measurements are easily affected by the atmosphere as the radar signals propagate through the atmosphere. Therefore, in order to acquire accurate surface deformation, correction of atmosphere delay error is critical and becomes the main topic of this paper. In which a pair of ALOS PALSAR images were employed and the InSAR processing was performed. Subsequently supplementary data including local meteorological data and MERIS data were introduced to generate the atmospheric delay interferogram. After the atmospheric delay interferogram was removed from the original interferogram, D-InSAR was implemented to obtain the deformation. After comparing with GPS observations, the reliability and accuracy of the detected deformation was demonstrated.