Toward full exploitation of coherent and incoherent information in Sentinel-1 TOPS data for retrieving surface displacement: Application to the 2016 Kumamoto (Japan) earthquake

• Main Authors: Jiang, Houjun, Feng, Guangcai, Wang, Teng, Bürgmann, Roland
• Other Authors: Earth Observatory of Singapore
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: SAR; InSAR
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/83056; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/42417
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Sentinel-1's continuous observation program over all major plate boundary regions makes it well suited for earthquake studies. However, decorrelation due to large displacement gradients and limited azimuth resolution of the Terrain Observation by Progressive Scan (TOPS) data challenge acquiring measurements in the near field of many earthquake ruptures and prevent measurements of displacements in the along-track direction. Here we propose to fully exploit the coherent and incoherent information of TOPS data by using standard interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR), split-bandwidth interferometry in range and azimuth, swath/burst-overlap interferometry, and amplitude cross correlation to map displacements in both the line-of-sight and the along-track directions. Application to the 2016 Kumamoto earthquake sequence reveals the coseismic displacements from the far field to the near field. By adding near-field constraints, the derived slip model reveals more shallow slip than obtained when only using far-field data from InSAR, highlighting the importance of exploiting all coherent and incoherent information in TOPS data.