Estimating deformation due to soil liquefaction in Urayasu city, Japan using permanent scatterers

Abstract In Japan, several cities endured severe damage due to soil liquefaction phenomenon, which was developed in association with the massive shaking of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake. Measuring soil liquefaction deformations was not an easy task, mainly because of the total loss of signal coherence in the affected regions. In this paper, we present our approach to estimate the deformations associated with soil liquefaction using interferometric synthetic aperture radar techniques. We use a stack of coseismic interferograms to identify the reliable pixels in the damaged areas using permanent scatterers technique. Then, we estimate and remove the preseismic mean velocity and DEM error components. Finally, we identify the liquefaction deformation component using least squares inversion and spatial phase filtering. We test the performance of the proposed approach using synthetic data, simulating the effects of soil liquefaction. The simulation results show a RMSE of the liquefaction deformation of 5.23 mm. After that, we estimate the deformation associated with soil liquefaction in Urayasu city, Japan, using ALOS–PALSAR data. The proposed approach allows a prompt estimation of the liquefaction deformation by utilizing the SAR images archives with only one postseismic SAR image.

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