The application of InSAR technique for investigating mass movement in Semirom, Southeast Iran

Landslides are among the most catastrophic natural hazards in the world, often result in serious damage to infrastructure and loss of human lives depending on their scales. Various ground-based geodetic observations using techniques such as GPS have traditionally been used by engineers and scientists to monitor and assess landslide hazards. The main limitation of these techniques is that they provide only point-based measurements, so they cannot fully map the spatial extent of the moving area. Moreover, they are often employed to monitor slope motion on landslides that have already been identified in the field or are known to be creeping, but cannot be used for recognition studies. Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry is becoming increasingly widely used for detection and monitoring of earth surface processes. In this study we use SAR Interferometry for detection and monitoring of displacement on mountain slopes in Semirom, Southeast Iran. Our data consist of 15 ASAR images which were acquired by the Envisat satellite in a descending orbit between 2002 and 2005. We examine the InSAR time-series technique of Small Baseline (SBAS) approach to derive spatio-temporal characteristic of mass movement and compare the results with both traditional leveling and GPS measurements.