Surface deformation monitoring in Zhengzhou City from 2014 to 2016 using time-series InSAR

In recent years, with the development of urban expansion in Zhengzhou city, the underground resources, such as underground water and coal mining, have been exploited greatly, which have resulted in ground subsidence and several environmental issues. In order to study the spatial distribution and temporal changes of ground subsidence of Zhengzhou city, the Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) time series analysis technique combining persistent scatterers (PSs) and distributed scatterers (DSs) was proposed and applied. In particular, the orbit and topographic related atmospheric phase errors have been corrected by a phase ramp correction method. Furthermore, the deformation parameters of PSs and DSs are retrieved based on a layered strategy. The deformation and DEM error of PSs are first estimated using conventional PSI method. Then the deformation parameters of DSs are retrieved using an adaptive searching window based on the initial results of PSs. Experimental results show that ground deformation of the study area could be retrieved by the proposed method and the ground deformation is widespread and unevenly distributed with large differences. The deformation rate ranges from -55 to 10 mm/year, and the standard deviation of the results is about 8 mm/year. The observed InSAR results reveal that most of the subsidence areas are in the north and northeast of Zhengzhou city. Furthermore, it is found that the possible factors resulting in the ground subsidence include sediment consolidation, water exploitation, and urban expansion. The result could provide significant information to serve the land subsidence mitigation in Zhengzhou city.