The Woda area in the upper Jinsha River has steep terrain and broken structures, causing landslide disasters frequently. Here, we used the distributed scatterer interferometric SAR (DS-InSAR) method to monitor and analyze the Woda landslide area. With the DS-InSAR method, we derived the deformation of the Woda landslide area from 106 Sentinel-1A ascending images acquired between 5 November 2014 and 4 September 2019 and 102 Sentinel-1A descending images acquired between 31 October 2014 and 11 September 2019. The obvious advantage of the DS-InSAR method compared to the persistent scatterer (PS) InSAR (PS-InSAR) method is that the densities of the monitoring points were increased by 25.1% and 22.9% in the ascending and descending images, respectively. The two-dimensional deformation of the landslide area shows that the maximum surface deformation rate in the normal direction was −80 mm/yr, and in the east–west direction, 118 mm/yr. According to the rescaled range (R/S) analysis, the Hurst index values of the deformation trends were all greater than 0.5, which means the deformation trend will continue for some time. In addition, we analyzed the influencing factors and the deformation mechanism of the Woda landslide area and found that the surface deformation is closely related to the geological structure and precipitation, among which precipitation is the main factor triggering the deformation. Our monitoring results will help the local government to conduct regular inspections and strengthen landslide disaster prevention in low-coherence mountainous areas.

Coal-mining subsidence causes ground fissures and destroys surface structures, which may lead to severe casualties and economic losses. Time series interferometric synthetic aperture radar (TS-InSAR) plays an important role in surface deformation detection and monitoring without the restriction of weather and sunlight conditions. In addition, the probability integral method (PIM) is a surface movement model that is widely used in the field of mining subsidence. In recent years, the integration of TS-InSAR and the PIM has been extensively studied. In this paper, we propose a new method to estimate mining subsidence with the PIM based on TS-InSAR results. This study focuses on the improvement of a boundary constraint and dynamic parameter estimation in the PIM through the inversion of the line-of-sight (LOS) time series deformation derived by TS-InSAR. In addition, 45 Sentinel-1A images from 17 June 2015 to 27 December 2017 of a coal mine in Jiaozuo are utilized to acquire the surface displacement. We apply a time series deformation analysis using small baseline subsets (SBAS) and place the results into an improved PIM to estimate the mining parameters. The simulated mining subsidence is highly consistent with the leveling data, exhibiting an RMSE of 0.0025 m. Compared with the conventional method, the proposed method is more accurate in discovering displacement in mining areas. In the final section of this paper, some sources of error that affect the experiment are discussed.

Ground-based synthetic aperture radar interferometry (GB-InSAR) has the characteristics of high precision, high temporal resolution, and high spatial resolution, and is widely used in highwall deformation monitoring. The traditional GB-InSAR real-time processing method is to process the whole data set or group in time sequence. This type of method takes up a lot of computer memory, has low efficiency, cannot meet the timeliness of slope monitoring, and cannot perform deformation prediction and disaster warning forecasting. In response to this problem, this paper proposes a GB-InSAR time series processing method based on the LSTM (long short-term memory) model. First, according to the early monitoring data of GBSAR equipment, the time series InSAR method (PS-InSAR, SBAS, etc.) is used to obtain the initial deformation information. According to the deformation calculated in the previous stage and the atmospheric environmental parameters monitored, the LSTM model is used to predict the deformation and atmospheric delay at the next time. The phase is removed from the interference phase, and finally the residual phase is unwrapped using the spatial domain unwrapping algorithm to solve the residual deformation. The predicted deformation and the residual deformation are added to obtain the deformation amount at the current moment. This method only needs to process the difference map at the current moment, which greatly saves time series processing time and can realize the prediction of deformation variables. The reliability of the proposed method is verified by ground-based SAR monitoring data of the Guangyuan landslide in Sichuan Province.

Time series interferometric synthetic aperture radar (TS-InSAR) has been a powerful tool for monitoring land surface deformation over the last two decades. Atmospheric effects cause large-scale delays in InSAR observations, which is one of the difficulties facing deformation calculations from differential InSAR and time-series InSAR. Currently, the atmospheric delay is derived mainly from auxiliary data from sources such as the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) and moderate-resolution imaging spectroradiometry (MODIS), but GNSS data are limited by the sparse distribution of observation stations. MODIS data may also not temporally match SAR image acquisition, which leads to low accuracy in atmospheric phase correction. This article presents a decomposition method to remove the atmospheric delay. We consider the atmospheric phase to be caused by the combined changes in spatial position and elevation. Therefore, quadtree segmentation is applied to divide the topographic units, and we improve the drift function of universal kriging by adding an elevation component. We then interpolate the whole atmospheric phase space from reliable sampling points estimated by the coherence coefficient. Using Sentinel-1 data, we test the proposed method in discriminating and monitoring a mining subsidence area in Shanxi Province and compare the results with the results from interferometric point target analysis and the network-based variance-covariance estimation method. The results demonstrate that the proposed method is superior to existing methods for the detection of deformation inverted from TS-InSAR.

Nonlinear deformation is a dynamically changing pattern of multiple surface deformations caused by groundwater overexploitation, underground coal mining, landslides, urban construction, etc., which are often accompanied by severe damage to surface structures or lead to major geological disasters; therefore, the high-precision monitoring and prediction of nonlinear surface deformation is significant. Traditional deep learning methods encounter challenges such as long-term dependencies or difficulty capturing complex spatiotemporal patterns when predicting nonlinear deformations. In this study, we developed a dual-attention-mechanism CNN-LSTM network model (DACLnet) to monitor and accurately predict nonlinear surface deformations precisely. Using advanced time series InSAR results as input, the DACLnet integrates the spatial feature extraction capability of a convolutional neural network (CNN), the advantages of the time series learning of a long short-term memory (LSTM) network, and the enhanced focusing effect of the dual-attention mechanism on crucial information, significantly improving the prediction accuracy of nonlinear surface deformations. The groundwater overexploitation area of the Turpan Basin, China, is selected to test the nonlinear deformation prediction effect of the proposed DACLnet. The results demonstrate that the DACLnet accurately captures developmental trends in historical surface deformations and effectively predicts surface deformations for the next two months in the study area. Compared to traditional LSTM and CNN-LSTM methods, the root mean square error (RMSE) of the DACLnet improved by 85.09% and 68.57%, respectively. These research results can provide crucial technical support for the early warning and prevention of geological disasters and can serve as an effective alternative tool for short-term ground subsidence prediction in areas lacking hydrogeological and other related data.

The Xishan coal mine area in Beijing, China has a long history of mining. Many landslide hazards, in addition to collapses and ground fractures, have occurred in this area. This study used multi-temporal satellite images to extract this region’s deformation information, identify landslides and analyze the deformation evolution process of these landslides. Taking the Anzigou ditch as an example, we investigate the “Quarry–Landslide–Mudslide” disaster chain model. We found that the landslide evolution process is closely related to the geological conditions, and usually goes through four stages: initial deformation, slope front swelling and collapsing, rear part connecting and rupturing, and landslide creeping. The surface deformation can be identified and tracked by high-resolution optical images and InSAR monitoring. Under the combined effects of rainfall and topographic conditions, medium and large landslides may occur and trigger a “Quarry–Landslide–Mudflow” disaster chain. The identification and analysis of these landslide hazards and the disaster chain help with geological disaster prevention, and provide reference for early identification and research of similar disasters.