Turbulent atmospheric phase correction for SBAS-InSAR

Abstract

The atmospheric phase, which is the sum of vertical stratification and turbulent atmospheric phase, is a major challenge currently faced by small baseline subset interferometric synthetic aperture radar (SBAS-InSAR) measurements. Many previous studies have demonstrated that the former can be separated from the interferogram by establishing a functional model between it and the topography. Due to the high variability of the turbulent atmospheric phase (TAP) in the space and time domains, however, the TAP is difficult to model and remove. Recently, many stochastic models have been developed to reduce the influence of the TAP in SBAS-InSAR. To avoid the rank deficient in stochastic model method, we present a correction method using network-based variance estimation, interferogram stacking and ordinary kriging interpolation (NIO). There are three main steps in the proposed algorithm to ensure the accuracy of the correction result: (1) adaptively identify and select sufficient good-quality interferograms that contain less turbulent atmospheric noise to participate in deformation calculation; (2) further select the short temporal baseline interferogram and mask the corresponding deformation location to avoid the effect of deformation; and 3) take advantage of ordinary kriging interpolation to reduce the effects of TAP from the selected good-quality interferograms. The performance of the proposed method has been validated with a set of simulations and real Sentinel-1A SAR data in Southern California, USA.