TERRASAR-X INSAR PROCESSING IN NORTHERN BOHEMIAN COAL BASIN USING CORNER REFLECTORS (PRELIMINARY RESULTS)

Abstract. The area of Northern Bohemian coal basin is rich in brown coal. Part of it is undermined, but large areas were mined using open-pit mines. There are numerous reclaimed waste dumps here, with a horse racetrack, roads and in some cases also houses. However, on most of the waste dumps, there are forests, meadows and fields. Above the coal basin, there are the Ore mountains which are suspected to be sliding down to the open mines below them.

We installed 11 corner reflectors in the area and monitor them using the TerraSAR-X satellite. One of the reflectors is situated in the area of radar layover, therefore it cannot be processed. We present preliminary results of monitoring the remaining corner reflectors, with the use of 7 TerraSAR-X scenes acquired between June and December 2011.

We process whole scene crops, as well as the artificial reflector information alone. Our scene set contains interferometric pairs with perpendicular baselines reaching from 0 to 150 m. Such a configuration allows us to distinguish deformations from DEM errors, which are usual when the SRTM (Shuttle Radar Topography Mission) DEM (X-band) is used for Stripmap data.

Unfortunately, most of the area of interest is decorrelated due to vegetation that covers both the Ore mountains and the reclaimed waste dumps. We had to enlarge the scene crop in order to be able to distinguish deformations from the atmospheric delay. We are still not certain about the stability of some regions.

For the installed artificial reflectors, the expected deformations are in the order of mm/year. Generally, deformations in the area of interest may reach up to about 5 cm/year for the Ervěnice corridor (a road and railway built on a waste dump). When processing artificial corner reflector information alone, we check triangular sums and perform the processing for all possible point combinations – and that allows us to correct for some unwrapping errors. However, the problem is highly ambiguous.