An improved time series SAR interferometry (TSInSAR) for investigating earthquake-induced active unstable slopes (AUS) in Pakistan

This study presents an improvement in the time series interferometric SAR (TSInSAR) technique with the help of distributed scatterers (DS) detected through the fast statistically homogeneous pixel selection (faSHP) approach and jointly processed with persistent scatterers (PS) within the interferometric point target analysis (IPTA) framework to study landslide hazards. The method is applied to PALSAR-2 images and Sentinel-1 data.

The quantitative assessment showed the effectiveness of the method in delineating the sliding surfaces of the unstable slopes and achieving approximately four times higher point density as compared to the standard SAR interferometry approach when applied to PALSAR-2 data and approximately nine times higher point targets when Sentinel-1 data is used. This study also reports the discovery of a giant destabilized slope (~2.30 sq. km) located near Patika Village along the Neelam River.  The study findings are a great addition to the communities working in the field of MT-InSAR and landslides.