GPS and DInSAR timeseries SISTEM integration for interseismic motion detection — A case study from the Hyblean Plateau in South-East Sicily

Within this study we tested a combination of processing tools in order to overcome certain limitations of Advanced Differential Interferometrie SAR (A-DInSAR) for the detection of intraplate surface motion. The study area is located over the Hyblean Plateau in south-east Sicily, Italy. Instead of usually applied spatio-temporal smoothing of the stacked dataset, we calculated the atmospheric contribution within the interferometrie signal by external data from the global meteorological model ERA-INTERIM. Furthermore we enhanced the coverage of the mean line-of-sight velocity by gap filling and applied a multi-directional filter. For this we used ENVISAT ASAR imagery (49 scenes descending and 58 scenes ascending orbit). The output was then integrated with local GPS data into the SISTEM framework to decompose the measurements into a 3-dimensional velocity field. While in areas of no GPS stations, detected deformation is not precise enough, the results in areas of good GPS coverage look promising with accuracies down to 1 mm/y and various zones of surface deformation could be detected successfully.