Multitemporal interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) is increasingly being used for Earth observations. Inaccurate estimation of the covariance matrix is considered to be the most important source of error in such applications. Previous studies, namely, DeSpecKS and its variants, have demonstrated their advantages in improving the estimation accuracy for distributed targets by means of statistically homogeneous pixels (SHPs). However, these methods may be unreliable for small sample sizes and sensitive to data stacks showing large time spacing due to the variability of the temporal sample. Moreover, these methods are computationally intensive. In this paper, a new algorithm named fast SHP selection (FaSHPS) is proposed to solve both problems. FaSHPS explores the confidence interval for each pixel by invoking the central limit theorem and then selects SHPs using this interval. Based on identified SHPs, two estimators with respect to the despeckling and the bias mitigation of the sample coherence are proposed to refine the elements of the InSAR covariance matrix. A series of qualitative and quantitative evaluations are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

China’s massive wave of urbanization may be threatened by land subsidence. Using a spaceborne synthetic aperture radar interferometry technique, we provided a systematic assessment of land subsidence in all of China’s major cities from 2015 to 2022. Of the examined urban lands, 45% are subsiding faster than 3 millimeters per year, and 16% are subsiding faster than 10 millimeters per year, affecting 29 and 7% of the urban population, respectively. The subsidence appears to be associated with a range of factors such as groundwater withdrawal and the weight of buildings. By 2120, 22 to 26% of China’s coastal lands will have a relative elevation lower than sea level, hosting 9 to 11% of the coastal population, because of the combined effect of city subsidence and sea-level rise. Our results underscore the necessity of enhancing protective measures to mitigate potential damages from subsidence.

The state-of-the-art techniques have demonstrated that coherence error degrades the performance of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometry (InSAR) for distributed scatterers (DSs). This article aims at fully evaluating the influence of coherence error on DS InSAR time-series analysis. In particular, we present a methodology to increase the estimation accuracy of DS interferometry, with emphasis on spatiotemporal coherence refinement. The motive behind this is that bias removal and variance mitigation of sample coherence matrix impose optimum weighting for estimating phase series and geophysical parameters of interest, whereas maximization of temporal coherence in a reference network can avoid spatial error propagation during the least-squares adjustment. Rather than developing independent processing chains, we integrate this method into SqueeSAR technique and simultaneously take the advantage of StaMPS into consideration. Using simulation and real data over southwestern China, comprehensive comparisons before and after spatiotemporal coherence refinement are performed over various coherence scenarios. The results tested from different phase and displacement rate estimators validate the effectiveness of the presented method.

The coherence of radar echoes is a fundamental observable in interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) measurements. It provides a quantitative measure of the scattering properties of imaged surfaces and therefore is widely applied to study the physical processes of the Earth. However, unfortunately, the estimated coherence values are often biased due to various reasons such as radar signal nonstationarity and the bias in the estimators used. In this paper, we focus on multitemporal InSAR coherence estimation and present a hybrid approach that mitigates effectively the errors in the estimation. The proposed approach is almost completely self-adaptive and workable for both Gaussian and non-Gaussian SAR scenes. Moreover, the bias of the sample coherence can be mitigated with even only several samples included for a given pixel. Therefore, it is a more pragmatic method for accurate coherence estimation and can be applied actually. Different data sets are used to test the proposed method and demonstrate its advantages.

Forests are crucial in carbon sequestration and oxygen release. An accurate assessment of forest carbon storage is meaningful for Chinese cities to achieve carbon peak and carbon neutrality. For an accurate estimation of regional-scale forest aboveground carbon density, this study applied a Sentinel-2 multispectral instrument (MSI), Advanced Land Observing Satellite 2 (ALOS-2) L-band, and Sentinel-1 C-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) to estimate and map the forest carbon density. Considering the forest field-inventory data of eastern China from 2018 as an experimental sample, we explored the potential of the deep-learning algorithms convolutional neural network (CNN) and Keras. The results showed that vegetation indices from Sentinel-2, backscatter and texture characters from ALOS-2, and coherence from Sentinel-1 were principal contributors to the forest carbon-density estimation. Furthermore, the CNN model was found to perform better than traditional models. Results of forest carbon-density estimation validated the improvements effectively by combining the optical and radar data. Compared with traditional regression methods, deep learning has a higher potential for accurately estimating forest carbon density using multisource remote-sensing data.