OPTIMUM CONDITIONS FOR DIFFERENTIAL SAR INTERFEROMETRY TECHNIQUE TO ESTIMATE HIMALAYAN GLACIER VELOCITY

Abstract. Differential SAR Interferometry (DInSAR) is the process of differencing two Interferograms for measuring surface movement with an accuracy of millimeter range. The DInSAR process can be applied to observe glacier movement, earthquake deformations, volcanic activities and rate of subsidence or uplift caused due to the extraction of groundwater or coal. By using single pass interferometry technique we can also generate accurate DEM. In this paper, we are presenting the movement of a Chhota Shigri glacier with the help two pass DInSAR technique and mainly we concentrated on the optimum conditions for estimating glacier movement using DInSAR. We got good coherence and Interferogram fringes for L-band sensor with less temporal baseline. Therefore, we generated glacier velocity using ALOS-2 data with 14 days temporal baseline. Initially, we generated Interferogram (defo-pair) by taking 10th March 2015 image as a master and 24th March 2015 image as a slave. But this generated Interferogram also having topographic information and atmospheric errors with the displacement component. Therefore, we used SRTM DEM for removing topographic information from the Interferogram. Because we are using L-band data, results may not be affected by troposphere. Maximum glacier velocity we observed in the accumulation zone as 7.285 cm/day in the month of March and while it’s moving towards ablation zone the glacier velocity is decreasing.