Rapidly accelerating subsidence in the Greater Vancouver region from two decades of ERS-ENVISAT-RADARSAT-2 DInSAR measurements

Rapidly accelerating ground subsidence in the south-western part of British Columbia, the third largest metropolitan area in Canada with over 2.3 million of inhabitants, is estimated using the Multidimensional Small Baseline Subset (MSBAS) advanced Differential Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (DInSAR), an effective processing strategy for multi-mission, multi-temporal SAR data. The Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data used in this study consists of seven independent data sets: one ascending and one descending ERS-1/2 and ENVISAT frames, together spanning July 1995–September 2010, and three RADARSAT-2 frames spanning February 2009–October 2012. During the July 1995–October 2012 period we observe fast ground subsidence with a maximum rate of about 2 cm/year in the Greater Vancouver region that includes the Fraser River Delta and the cities of Burnaby, Richmond, Surrey, New Westminster and Vancouver. The rapidly accelerating subsidence is observed beneath the Vancouver International Airport, SkyTrain terminal as well as several agricultural and industrial locales. These time series suggest that the subsidence rate at the studied regions does not decrease with time, as suggested in previous studies, but remains steady or increases. These results also demonstrate the importance of acquiring and appropriately estimating longer time series, as previous studies on the same Greater Vancouver area may have misinterpreted the long term ground deformation rate and direction and underestimated the potential hazard. The long term impact of this subsidence on urban infrastructure can be significant and needs to be investigated further.