ERS Differential SAR Interferometry: A powerful tool for surface deformation analysis

We investigate the key role played by the European Remote Sensing satellites ERS-1 and ERS-2 to demonstrate the revolutionary nature of the Differential Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (DInSAR) technique to investigate surface displacements over large temporal and spatial scales. The presented analysis starts with a short overview of the basic principles of DInSAR, followed by the presentation of a number of successful applications based on exploiting ERS data; in particular, several results focused on seismic deformations, volcanic activities and land subsidence, are shown. Subsequently, the analysis is dedicated to introduce the recently developed advanced DInSAR algorithms. In this case the emphasis is given on discussing the approaches that allows analyzing time sequences of ERS SAR data to produce deformation time series. The main aspects related to these advanced DInSAR algorithms are discussed first, followed by the presentation of key results obtained by processing long time series of ERS data.