Geodetic network design for InSAR; Application to ground deformation monitoring

On 22 May 2016 Pooja Mahapatra defended her thesis successfull at the Technical University of Delft. The titel of her thesis is 'Geodetic network design for InSAR; Application to ground deformation monitoring'.

For the past two decades, interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) has been used to mon-itor ground deformation with subcentimetric precision from space. But the applicability of this technique is limited in regions with a low density of naturally-occurring phase-coherent radar tar-gets, e.g. vegetated nonurbanized areas. Third-party end-users of InSAR survey results cannot, in a systematic way, determine a priori whether these coherent targets have adequate spatial distribution to estimate the parameters of their interest. Additionally, InSAR deformation estimates are referred to a local datum, meaning that the technique is sensitive only to the relative deformation occurring within the SAR images. This makes it difficult to compare these estimates with those from other techniques, e.g. historical levelling data or changes in the sea level. Here we propose the design of a geodetic network for InSAR, aimed at densifying the naturally-occurring measurement network and converting from a local datum to a global one.

You can download the thesis here.