Surface Displacement Measurement from Remote Sensing Images

9Anthropogenic Activity: Monitoring Surface-Motion Consequences of Human Activities with Spaceborne InSAR

Bénédicte FRUNEAU¹, Dinh HO TONG MINH² and Daniel RAUCOULES³

¹LaSTIG, Gustave Eiffel University, Champs-sur-Marne, France

²UMR-TETIS, INRAE, France

³BRGM, Orléans, France

9.1. Introduction

Human activities ranging from water pumping for drinking water or irrigating purposes, to oil and gas extraction from buried reservoirs or underground structures often result in depletion or uplift of the ground. Subsurface anthropogenic activity can also amplify natural subsidence and can even trigger significant earthquakes (Grandin et al. 2017). Human-related deformation has been widely observed and covers a broad range of scales, both spatial and temporal: it includes diffuse and low ground subsidence (i.e. mainly vertical downward displacement) covering large areas, as well as fast and punctual subsidence, depending on the involved phenomena. Monitoring the spatial extent and temporal evolution of surface deformations is critical for the mitigation of related hazards, since they may affect populations, buildings and infrastructures. This is especially a major issue in urban areas, and more so in densely populated ones such as megacities, but also in coastal areas where subsidence can increase vulnerability to flooding and impact sea level rise (Chaussard et al. 2013). Several cities in the world are facing significant land subsidence due to groundwater over-extraction. In addition ...