Deformations of Highway over Undermined Ostrava-Svinov Area Monitored by InSAR Using Limited Set of SAR Images

Part of Czech highway D1 connecting Ostrava city with Prague and Poland, is built over an undermined area of Ostrava-Svinov, with mines closed since 1991 in the area. Soon after its opening ceremony in 2008, the highway began to exhibit various significant deformations. An attempt of InSAR monitoring using ERS, Envisat and several TerraSAR-X Spotlight acquisitions was done in order to monitor progress of deformations, to consider suitability of satellite InSAR for such purposes and to search for footprints whether the deformations were caused by fading subsidence due to undermining or by another, local, reason. Only shallow subsidence was found in the area from Envisat data ranging 2005-2010. Highway deformations in late 2011 are observable from processing of limited set of 5 TerraSAR-X images using different methods. Detected deformations are very probably due to longitudinal thermal expansion of the observed highway bridge. This publication contains issues to be taken into consideration for appropriate interpretation and processing if the available input dataset is limited and not optimal.