Monitoring mining induced surface deformation

There exists a significant demand for the monitoring of mining induced surface deformation for legal obligation safety, and environmental reasons. In recent years land surface deformation monitoring with SAR data reached some maturity. Nevertheless, there remain important limitations to the availability of the EO based information. Reasons include incomplete spatial coverage with information gaps for low coherence areas, problems in resolving high phase gradients, and unavailability of the required SAR data. The objective of our contribution is to show that important improvements to these limitations are still possible. In vegetated areas and for fast deformations L-band INSAR was found to be more robust with a wider applicability than C-band INSAR. In some low coherence areas point-like scatterers can be identified which permit to fill important information gaps. Furthermore, pairs with long baselines can be included in the interferometric analysis, supporting a more complete use of the available SAR acquisitions and to improve the temporal sampling