Review on InSAR based displacement monitoring of Indian Himalayas: issues, challenges and possible advanced alternatives

Abstract

Natural and man-made disasters like earthquakes, landslides, avalanches, unplanned mining are some of the most serious factors responsible for earth surface displacement. These incidences can be harmful for the society due to loss of life and also threatful for future urban development. Therefore, continuous monitoring of disasters in terms of displacements is of fundamental importance in a modern well-organized society to understand its effects on the social and economic fabric. Availability of SAR data has been proved to be an excellent source for estimation of surface displacements with high accuracies. However, in India, SAR interferometry-related displacement measurement has still not gained appreciable momentum. More rigorous research needs to be carried out for the efficient use of this new generation technique. This review article is an attempt to discuss the issues related to SAR-based displacement studies so far conducted on Indian Himalayan region and possible advanced alternatives.

Keywords:

• SAR interferometry (InSAR)
• differential SAR interferometry (DInSAR)
• permanent scatterer (PS)
• small baseline subset (SBAS)
• feature tracking

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Institute for cartography, TU Dresden, Germany, for providing the research facilities. The corresponding author would like to acknowledge the research funding from the Alexander von Humboldt (AvH) Foundation. The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments and suggestions, which helped greatly improve the manuscript.