Monitoring underground mining subsidence in South Indiana with C- and L-band InSAR technique

In the state of Indiana over 1500 million tons of coal were extracted from underground in the past 150 years. As a consequence, today many of the long-abandoned mines pose a serious risk to the local. When the abandoned mine shafts collapse, the ground above can drop as much as several feet along with everything on it. Thus it is essential for a long-term-wide-range monitoring technique to map the ground subsidence over the local mining area. In this study, we try to evaluate the mining area ground subsidence with interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) technique, which is famous for its capability of wide-area and high-precision monitoring. Furthermore, for better understanding the ground motion with respect to difference RADAR frequencies, we use data with different wavelengths in this project, C-band and L-band respectively. The result shows that overall the monitored area were stable but we can still detect ground movements at the location of a few mining spots.