Correction of local and global tropospheric effects on differential SAR interferograms for the study of earthquake phenomena

The presence of atmospheric contributions in SAR interferograms represents the main limit for the detection of ground deformation movements. This paper presents a methodological approach to reduce at both global and local scales the tropospheric contributions in the interferograms. It first requires the refined knowledge of the permanent scatterers that can only be obtained from the analysis of a large population of interferograms. The correction of global scale atmospheric contribution exploits the correlation between phase and topography and the correction of local artefacts is based on correlation between interferograms containing one common acquisition.