Detecting Rock Glacier Displacement in the Central Himalayas Using Multi-Temporal InSAR

• Published in: Remote Sensing
• Main Authors: Xuefei Zhang, Min Feng, Hong Zhang, Chao Wang, Yixian Tang, Jinhao Xu, Dezhao Yan, Chunling Wang
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021
• Subjects: Himalayas; MT-InSAR; rock glaciers; deformation; active deformation areas; activity; Science; Q; Psi; permafrost
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13234738; https://doaj.org/article/0855640c8ebb43d890d43b9f9026686e

Rock glaciers represent typical periglacial landscapes and are distributed widely in alpine mountain environments. Rock glacier activity represents a critical indicator of water reserves state, permafrost distribution, and landslide disaster susceptibility. The dynamics of rock glacier activity in alpine periglacial environments are poorly quantified, especially in the central Himalayas. Multi-temporal Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (MT-InSAR) has been shown to be a useful technique for rock glacier deformation detection. In this study, we developed a multi-baseline persistent scatterer (PS) and distributed scatterer (DS) combined MT-InSAR method to monitor the activity of rock glaciers in the central Himalayas. In periglacial landforms, the application of the PS interferometry (PSI) method is restricted by insufficient PS due to large temporal baseline intervals and temporal decorrelation, which hinder comprehensive measurements of rock glaciers. Thus, we first evaluated the rock glacier interferometric coherence of all possible interferometric combinations and determined a multi-baseline network based on rock glacier coherence; then, we constructed a Delaunay triangulation network (DTN) by exploiting both PS and DS points. To improve the robustness of deformation parameters estimation in the DTN, we combined the Nelder–Mead algorithm with the M-estimator method to estimate the deformation rate variation at the arcs of the DTN and introduced a ridge-estimator-based weighted least square (WLR) method for the inversion of the deformation rate from the deformation rate variation. We applied our method to Sentinel-1A ascending and descending geometry data (May 2018 to January 2019) and obtained measurements of rock glacier deformation for 4327 rock glaciers over the central Himalayas, at least more than 15% detecting with single geometry data. The line-of-sight (LOS) deformation of rock glaciers in the central Himalayas ranged from −150 mm to 150 mm. We classified the active deformation area (ADA) of all ...