Wide-Swath InSAR Geodesy and Its Applications to Large-Scale Deformation Monitoring

The increasing demands for large-scale terrain information and land surface environmental change monitoring, as well as increasing availability of wide-swath (WS) SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) data acquisitions from the Sentinel-1A and ALOS-2, WS InSAR (SAR Interferometry) technology has made InSAR a hot research topic in the fields of large-scale topographic surveying and mapping, Geodynamics (earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, etc.) and structural monitoring, . In this paper, on the basis of our existing research and the recent research achievements, we review the two kinds of WS SAR acquisition geometries, ScanSAR (Scanning SAR) mode and TOPS (Terrain Observation by Progressive Scans) mode, and analyze the main limitations and solutions in InSAR applications. We investigate the key sources of error in deformation monitoring, WS InSAR time series analysis methods, azimuth displacement observation methods, and the applications of coseismic and postseismic crustal deformation monitoring during the 2008 Mw7.1 Yutian Earthquake. We end with a discussion of the next generation high resolution WS SAR satellite and summarize trends in WS InSAR. With continuous data acquisition, WS InSAR Geodesy will achieve in-depth development.