Subsidence Monitoring over the Southern Coalfield, Australia Using both L-Band and C-Band SAR Time Series Analysis

Land subsidence is a global issue and researchers from all over the world are keen to know the causes of deformation and its further influences. This paper reports the findings from time series InSAR (TS-InSAR) results over the Southern Coalfield, Australia using both ALOS-1 PALSAR (Phased Array type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar) and ENVISAT ASAR (Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar) datasets. TS-InSAR has been applied to both rural and urban areas with great success, but very few of them have been applied to regions affected by underground mining activities. The TS-InSAR analysis exploited in this paper is based on GEOS-ATSA, and Measurement Point (MP) pixels are selected according to different geophysical features. Three experiment sites with different geological settings within the study zone are analysed: (1) Wollongong city, which is a relatively stable area: (2) Tahmoor town, a small town affected by underground mining activities: and (3) the Appin underground mining site, a region containing multiple underground mining activities. The TS-InSAR results show that the performance of both C-band and L-band is equally good over Wollongong, where the subsidence gradient is not significant and most subsidence rates are between −10 mm∙yr−1 to 10 mm∙yr−1. However, over the Tahmoor and Appin sites, difference in performances has been observed. Since the maximum displacement gradients that can be detected are different for L-band and C-band-based TS-InSAR methods, some rapid changes could cause the TS-InSAR to fail to estimate the correct displacements. It is well known that L-band can perform better than C-band, especially in underground mining regions and mining-affected regions where the deformation rate is much higher than city areas because of its wavelength. Statistical analyses are also conducted to further prove the above statement.