Monitoring on subsidence due to repeated excavation with DInSAR technology

DInSAR technology was used to monitor subsidence caused by underground coal mining activities in mountainous area, with multi source SAR data, including 8 EnviSAT C-band and 4 ALOS L-band, and 4 programmed TerraSAR-X dataset. The results revealed that 2-pass DInSAR technique sometimes failed to retrieve the mining-caused subsidence due to spatial and/or temporal de-correlation. We also noticed that there existed residual topographic phase after the compensation with SRTM DEM, which could almost overwhelm the subsidence information when the perpendicular baseline was relatively large. Based on the mining materials, analysis was made on the shape of subsidence area. For the well geo-coded results from TerraSAR-X, confirmed by GPS surveying results of corner reflectors, we tried to extract the advance distance of influence besides the subsidence area. Due to the big deformation gradient over stopingfaces, the X-band SAR data could not capture the maximum value subsidence revealed by GPS survey in our preliminary results, the same as C-band EnviSAT data. This will turn to be our research subject in the next few months.