Assessment of subsidence in Delhi NCR due to groundwater depletion using TerraSAR-X and persistent scatterers interferometry

ABSTRACT

Currently, high-resolution SAR data is available from different satellites. These datasets have been proved to be a strong source to monitor land subsidence. This paper aims to use high-resolution Persistent Scatterers Interferometry (PSI) to estimate the urban subsidence in Delhi NCR. TerraSAR-X images in 68 numbers spread over a period of 26 months during September 2011 – September 2013 have been used to assess the land surface subsidence. The study area is covered with large infrastructure projects such as railway lines, bridges, highways, metro bridges and tunnels. The resultant surface subsidence has been compared with the groundwater table data and it appears that most of the subsidence has been induced by the over-exploitation of groundwater in the area. In some areas, we can clearly see that the rapid construction activities contributing to the surface subsidence phenomenon. Development of a new construction project required groundwater to be used in the activity which impacts the groundwater table. This deterioration of the groundwater table has led to the land subsidence. The study suggests that there is an urgent need to address the issue of groundwater exploitation in the affected areas to check the current phenomenon of subsidence. This is a distinctive work carried out over the study area.

KEYWORDS:

• Multi-temporal InSAR
• subsidence
• groundwater
• TerraSAR-X
• Delhi

Acknowledgment

Authors highly acknowledge the support provided at the Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines), Dhanbad, India. We are grateful to have received the TerraSAR-X data from DLR under the research proposal (LAN 3000). We also acknowledge the Central Ground Water Board, New Delhi for providing the groundwater table data for this study. Authors also acknowledge the use of Google Earth to display the result.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Kapil Malik is a research scholar at the Department of Mining Engineering in Indian Institute of Technology, Dhanbad. He has been working in the field of remote sensing since 12 year after completing the Master of Remote Sensing in 2006. He mainly works with SAR data processing for difference application in the field of Geosciences.

Dr Dheeraj Kumar is presently working as Professor in the Department of Mining Engineering, IIT (ISM), Dhanbad. He completed his M.Tech. from Indian School of Mines (ISM), Dhanbad in the year 1999 with Rock Excavation Engineering as specialization and Ph.D. in Mining Engineering in 2003 from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur. He has more than 15 years’ experience of system administration and teaching and research at organizations viz. Indian Institute of Production Management, L&T Kansbahal; KIIT Bhubaneswar and IIT Kharagpur. His areas of expertise include Surveying, Geomatics and IT Application in different mining domains. He has published more than 100 technical research papers in various international/national journals including proceedings of seminars/symposiums and presented several papers in conferences in India and abroad.

Daniele Perissin was born in Milan, Italy, in 1977. He received his Master in Telecommunications Engineering and his Ph.D. in Information Technology (cum laude) from Politecnico di Milano in 2002 and 2006, respectively. He joined the Signal Processing research group at Politecnico di Milano in 2002, and since then, he has been working on the Permanent Scatterers technique in the framework of Radar Remote Sensing. In 2009, he joined the Institute of Space and Earth Information Science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong as Research Assistant Professor. Since October 2013, he holds a position as Assistant Professor at Purdue University (U.S.A), School of Civil Engineering. He is author of a patent on the use of urban dihedral reflectors for combining multi-sensor Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) data and has published about 80 research works in journals and conference proceedings, receiving the JSTARS best paper award in 2012.

ORCID

Daniele Perissin http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4086-8608