Topography-correlated atmospheric signal mitigation for InSAR applications in the Tibetan plateau based on global atmospheric models

ABSTRACT

Atmospheric heterogeneity mainly exposes itself as tropospheric-phase delay in Satellite Interferometric Synthetic Aperture radar (InSAR) observations, which smears or even overshadows the deformation component of InSAR measurements. In this study, we estimated the performance of four Global Atmospheric Models (GAMs), i.e. European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) Reanalysis v5 (ERA5), ERA-Interim (ERA-I), Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications v2 (MERRA2) and Generic Atmospheric Correction Online Service for InSAR (GACOS), for tropospheric-phase delay reduction in InSAR applications in the Tibetan plateau, of which ERA5 is the latest GAM released by ECMWF. We demonstrated the effectiveness of Atmospheric Phase Screen (APS) correction using the four GAMs for more than 700 Sentinel-1 Terrain Observation by Progressive Scans interferograms covering two study areas in the southern (R1) and northwest margins (R2) of the Tibetan plateau. Topography-correlated signals have been widely observed in these interferograms, which are most likely due to the APS effects. We calculated the Standard Deviations (SD) and Pearson’s Correlation Coefficients (r) between InSAR Line of Sight measurements and topography before and after applying APS correction. The results show that the SDs of non-deformation areas from the GAMs decrease to approximately 4 mm from around 10 mm and 12 mm originally on average for R1 and R2, respectively, and the r after the APS correction are reduced below 0.4 from around 0.8 for the selected interferometric pairs. In addition, as the newly released GAM, ERA5 has similar performance with GACOS products and outperforms other models generally. This suggests that GAMs, particularly ERA5, have great potential in the APS correction for InSAR applications in the Tibetan plateau.

Acknowledgements

We sincerely thank Editor Dr. Simonetta Paloscia, and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and constructive comments, which helped to improve the manuscript significantly. We would like to acknowledge ECMWF and National Aeronautics and Space Administration for sharing meteorological data free of charge. We also thank GACOS team for providing APS products online through their online system. Sentinel-1 TOPS data were downloaded from the ASF data centre free of charge. Most figures presented in this study were prepared using Generic Mapping Tools(Wessel et al. 2013).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research Program (STEP) [2019QZKK0901], the Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation [2020A1515011078], Geological Processes and Natural Disasters around the South China Sea (311020002) and Guangdong Province Introduced Innovative R&D Team of Geological Processes and Natural Disasters around the South China Sea [2016ZT06N331].