Extraction of wide-ranging crustal movement using ALOS/PALSAR ScanSAR interferometry

In recent years, huge earthquakes have occurred in many places and those have induced the crustal movements over hundreds of kilometers. In such cases, the entire movement area cannot be observed with differential interferometric SAR processing using Stripmap mode data, because Stripmap mode of ALOS/PALSAR covers only 70km swath. On the other hand, ScanSAR is suitable for extraction of wide-ranging crustal movement caused by huge earthquake due to its wide coverage about 350km swath. Authors tried ScanSAR-ScanSAR differential interferometric processing using a lot of pairs of PALSAR ScanSAR mode data. We processed in two actual huge earthquake cases. One is the 2008 China Wenchuan earthquake (May 12 2008, Mw 7.9) case, and the other is the 2010 Chile earthquake (Feb. 27 2010, Mw 8.8) case. In this paper, the results of these two ScanSAR-ScanSAR differential interferometric SAR processing using PALSAR data are introduced. As a result, it is demonstrated that ScanSAR-ScanSAR differential interferomtry is a very powerful tool to detect the wide ranging crustal movement caused by a huge earthquake.