Coverage of Roads and Railways in the Middle Oberrheingraben - A Comparison between PSInSAR and PSDSInSAR

Presently, Radar interferometry (InSAR) is the only measurement technique capable of observing ground motion on regional and even continental scale with sufficient point density for highly precise areal monitoring. It is predestined for performing wide area surveying tasks. In particular, first services in Italy and Austria that monitor foremost linear infrastructure (e.g. roads or railways) are proving to provide valuable information. In Germany, displacement data from the German Ground Motion Service (Bodenbewegungsdienst Deutschland, BBD) or the European Ground Motion Service (EGMS) that are available for the whole territory of the country, potentially could be the basis of such a service on regional scale. The usability is determined by the quality of data, the positioning accuracy, the frequency and timeliness of updates and the coverage with measurement points. Regarding coverage, neither BBD nor EGMS are using Distributed Scatterers (DS) for their InSAR analysis of Germany. In order to explore, if the additional effort of including DS in the processing is worthwhile, we evaluate displacement data from different sources to provide numbers for coverage of different categories of linear infrastructure (motorways, federal roads, state roads, county roads, train tracks). ... mehrWe compare EGMS data and data processed by the Geodetic Institute Karlsruhe (GIK) from the Oberrheingraben south of Freiburg. The data processed by GIK include DS and are based on essentially the same Sentinel-1-data as the EGMS data. We observe that a distinct increase of coverage results from the use of DS that may help to justify the additional effort to include DS in the processing of BBD or EGMS for Germany. In addition, the results from a stack of TerraSAR-X strip map data gives an impression of what can be achieved with higher data resolution.