PS-InSAR experiments for the analysis of urban ground deformation using StaMPS

Many works and European projects have proven the ability of Permanent Scatterers Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (PS-InSAR) to measure the slow deformation of the persistent ground objects with a millimetric precision measurement. Compared to the classical differential SAR Interferometry (DInSAR), PS-InSAR is an approach that estimates several contributions: atmospheric disturbances, orbital errors, deformation signal as well as topographical errors. In this paper, we propose to apply PS-InSAR for the analysis of the ground deformation phenomena in a urban context. For that purpose, the Stanford Method for Permanent Scatterers (StaMPS) is applied using an ERS data archive. StaMPS was developed in Stanford University by Andy Hooper. The advantages to use StaMPS were that it is free and many scripts are already available to process the dataset. In first steps of the processing, differential interferograms are produced using the Delft Object-oriented Radar Interferometric Software (DORIS), developed in Delft University of Technology . Doris is also a free tool. StaMPS method is briefly explained. A first experiment on the city of Paris, France, is presented, especially because PSINSAR and DInSAR results have already been published by several researchers. Therefore, the processing of Nantes (French city) is carried out. Some important results are shown.