MONITORING GROUND DEFORMATION OF MUD VOLCANOES USING RADAR INTERFEROMETRIC METHOD (SBAS) AND THERMAL DATA CASE STUDY: THE SOUTH-EASTERN PART OF THE CASPIAN SEA

Abstract. Mud volcano, as the most attractive geomorphological natural phenomena, includes the internal resources such as water sources or hydrocarbon reservoirs such as oil and gas fields. Therefore, monitoring their deformation and temperature anomaly has some important information of subsurface activity and mud-volcano structure. Interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) has shown to be an effective instrument for calculating mud volcano deformation. The purpose of this study is to monitor the deformation of the mud volcanoes and also its characteristics to thermal anomaly using SBAS method by ENVISAT (C-band) radar satellite images from 2003 to 2011. Therefore, the Landsat-8 image was used to retrieve the land surface temperature (LST). The results show the most surface deformation belongs to the mud volcanoes located in the northern part of Golestan Plain, and decreased towards the southern mud volcanoes. Moreover, the highest temperature belongs to Ounegh Yilghay and Sofikam mud volcanoes, but they indicate up-lifting (207 mm) and down-lifting (−14.64 mm) respectively.