Land subsidence prediction in Beijing based on PS-InSAR technique and improved Grey-Markov model

Land subsidence induced by excessive groundwater withdrawal has caused serious social, geological, and environmental problems in Beijing. Rapid increases in population and economic development have aggravated the situation. Monitoring and prediction of ground settlement is important to mitigate these hazards. In this study, we combined persistent-scatterer interferometric synthetic aperture radar with Grey system theory to monitor and predict land subsidence in the Beijing plain. Land subsidence during 2003–2014 was determined based on 39 ENVISAT advanced synthetic aperture radar (ASAR) images and 27 RadarSat-2 images. Results were consistent with global positioning system, leveling measurements at the point level and TerraSAR-X subsidence maps at the regional level. The average deformation rate in the line-of-sight was from −124 to 7 mm/year. To predict future subsidence, the time-series deformation was used to build a prediction model based on an improved Grey-Markov model (IGMM), which adapted the conventional GM(1,1) model by utilizing rolling mechanism and integrating a k-means clustering method in Markov-chain state interval partitioning. Evaluation of the IGMM at both point level and regional scale showed good accuracy (root-mean-square error <3 mm; R2 = 0.94 and 0.91). Finally, land subsidence in 2015–2016 was predicted, and the maximum cumulative deformation will reach 1717 mm by the end of 2016. The promising results indicate that this method can be used as an alternative to the conventional numerical and empirical models for short-term prediction when there is lack of detailed geological or hydraulic information.