Investigation of ground deformation in Taiyuan Basin, China from 2003 to 2010, with atmosphere-corrected time series InSAR

Excessive groundwater exploitation is common through the Taiyuan basin, China, and is
well known to result in ground subsidence. However, most ground subsidence studies in this
region focus on a single place (Taiyuan city), and thus fail to demonstrate the regional extent of
the deformation phenomena in the whole basin. In this study, we used Interferometric Synthetic
Aperture Radar (InSAR) time series analysis to investigate land subsidence across the entire Taiyuan
basin region. Our data set includes a total of 75 ENVISAT ASAR images from two different frames
acquired from August 2003 to September 2010 and 33 TerraSAR-X scenes spanning between March
2009 and March 2010. ERA-Interim reanalysis was used to correct the stratified delay to reduce
the bias expected from the systematic components of tropospheric delay. The residual delay after
correction of stratified delay can be considered as a stochastic component and be mitigated through
spatial-temporal filtering. A comparison with MERIS (Medium-Resolution Imaging Spectrometer)
measurements indicates that our atmospheric corrections improved agreement over the conventional
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spatial-temporal filtering by about 20%. The displacement results from our atmosphere-corrected
time series InSAR were further validated with continuous GPS data. We found eight subsiding centers
in the basin and a surface uplift to the north of Taiyuan city. The causes of ground deformation are
analyzed and discussed in relation to gravity data, pre-existing faults, and types of land use.