Monitoring of landslides in Nainital, Uttarakhand, India: Validation of PS-InSAR results

This paper investigates the efficacy of Stanford Method for Persistent Scatterers (StaMPS) to monitor the critical landslides in Nainital township and adjoining areas of state of Uttarakhand, India which has problems due to inadequate drainage management system, seismically active Main Boundary Thrust (MBT) passing from the area, unwanted construction on highly unstable slopes and low insitu strength of rocks. In this research work, 13 descending ENVISAT ASAR C-Band images of Nainital acquired between October 2008 to August 2010 are processed to study the PS-InSAR time series analysis for measuring surface displacement. The case study indicates that StaMPS efficiently extracted sufficient number of PS pixels and detected the slow movement occurring in some regions. In the study area, few critical zones are also identified where time series 1D-Line of Sight (LOS) displacement map shows the maximum deformation (away from the satellite) of about 17 mm/year.