Early Detection of Landslide Hazards in Mountainous Areas of West China Using Time Series SAR Interferometry-A Case Study of Danba, Sichuan

As the most frequent and devastating geohazard next to earthquakes, landslides are widely distributed in mountainous areas of west China, which makes early detection of landslides a vital task for geologic disaster prevention. Although time series SAR interferometry (InSAR) based on repeat-pass satellite SAR observations has shown a great potential in landslide detection, its performance is usually limited by factors such as vegetation coverage, which leads to low reliability of detection results. Aiming at this problem, we carry out a case study by employing the coherent scatterer InSAR (CSI) method to successfully detect 17 unstable slopes in Danba County in the upper reach of Dadu River Basin from archived ALOS PALSAR and ENVISAT ASAR datasets. The effectiveness and advantage of the CSI method are demonstrated by comparisons with other observation data as well as validation against field survey. And, major impact factors for the performance of time series InSAR analysis in landslide investigations and future research topics of high priority are summarized.