westudiedthesoutheastportionoftheporiversedimentary.docVIP

15 years of SAR Interferometry. Salvatore Stramondo INGV-Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Roma Abstract Since the end of ‘80s a technique based on the use of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data from Earth-orbiting instruments has been developed. The approach, known as SAR Interferometry (InSAR) is able to provide accurate measurements of the Earth’s surface deformations due to geological and geophysical phenomena, as earthquakes, landslides, volcanic eruptions. In the timeframe of less than two decades InSAR technique spread throughout a wide range of Earth science fields. During these years a huge number of applications has been performed and a vast amount of theoretical and applicative manuscript are available in literature today. Recent improvements of InSAR lead to the development of a new approach, referred to as Advanced InSAR (A-InSAR) techniques, addressed to the monitoring of slow movements along time. This work does not attempt to be a comprehensive review of the theory and application of InSAR and A-InSAR, but it would provide a basic overview of these techniques. 1- Introduction Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) exploits satellite orbit information to obtain a spatial resolution much higher (tens of meters) than standard radar systems. SAR processing significantly improves the resolution of point targets in both the cross-track (range) and along-track (azimuth) direction by focusing the raw radar echoes (Elachi 1988, Curlander McDonough 1991). The SAR signal processing technique referred to as SAR Interferometry (InSAR) is widely used in seismology, volcanology, hydrogeology and landslide studies. It is not far from truth saying that InSAR revolutioned a relevant part of Earth Sciences. In fact in the last 15 years InSAR demonstrated to have unique capabilities for mapping the topography and the deformation of the Earth surface. The InSAR approach is based on extracting the phase component of SAR data to compute the pixel-by-pixel