Land deformation monitoring in the Taiyuan area based on PS-InSAR

Land subsidence problems have become increasingly prominent. Traditional monitoring methods, such as level measurements, have high costs and low efficiency. Permanent scatterer interferometric synthetic aperture radar (PS-InSAR) has several advantages for land subsidence monitoring based on technological innovations. Aimed at resolving the key problems associated with PS-InSAR technology, the accuracy of three external digital elevations models (DEMs, namely, SRTM, ASTER GDEM, and PleiadesDEM) was analysed and compared. We found that the introduction of ground control points can significantly improve the elevation accuracy of DEMs. Herein, we introduce the specific processing steps and selection of the key parameters for IN-SAR data using the StaMPS software. We discuss the differences between IN-SAR technology and levelling measurements as well as the influence that the different external DEMs have on IN-SAR data. Based on 36 scenes of TerraSAR-X images, we obtained results for land deformation monitoring in Taiyuan City using PS-InSAR technology, which provided satisfactory monitoring results.