Exploring the use of Sentinel-1 to monitor spatial and temporal evolution of permafrost in the Swiss Alps

• Main Authors: Reinders, Kristina Juliana, Verhoeven, Govert Frederik, Sartorelli, Luca, Hanssen, Ramon, Manconi, Andrea
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2023
• Subjects: Psi; Ice; permafrost
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2023-2321; https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2023/egusphere-2023-2321/

In this work, we assess the performance of Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI) based on Sentinel-1 data in the Swiss Alps, focusing on the analysis of surface displacement in areas located in permafrost. To this end, we exploit a PSI dataset over Canton Wallis and the recently published permafrost and ground ice map of Switzerland (PGIM). First we evaluate the sensitivity to radar detection of the terrain, given a particular slope distribution and given satellite orbital geometries. We find that 92 % of the areas currently labeled as permafrost satisfy the geometric visibility criteria, which is a necessary but not sufficient condition for detection of ground movement by satellite radar. Second, we analyse the PSI surface velocity and displacement time series observed in Canton Wallis in the period 2015 to 2022. We find that the displacements rates appear to be correlated with the occurrence of permafrost and that there is a significant difference in displacement rates between ice-poor and ice-rich permafrost compared to no-permafrost zones. However, the difference between the surface velocities retrieved in ice-poor permafrost and no-permafrost zones are small and additional information would be needed to discriminate ice-poor permafrost zones.