SBAS-DInSAR analysis of very extended areas: First results on a 60 000-km(2) test site

We present the results of the first experiment to survey the temporal evolution of the deformation affecting very large areas using the Small BAseline Subset (SBAS) Differential Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (DInSAR) algorithm. In particular, we have analyzed a set of 264 descending European Remote Sensing (ERS) SAR data frames from 1992 to 2000; these data are relevant to an area in central Nevada (U.S.) that extends for about 600 x 100 kin. The starting point of our study has been the generation of an appropriate set of small baseline multilook interferograms computed from long SAR image strips, which were obtained by jointly focusing six contiguous raw data frames. Following their generation, the selected interferograms, which are computed on a spatial grid of 160 x 160 in, have been inverted via the SBAS technique to retrieve, for each coherent pixel, the displacement time series and the corresponding mean deformation velocity. The presented results are, to our knowledge the first ones with such an extended multitemporal SAR data set and they demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach to analyze the deformation of the investigated zone.