Bridging Loss-of-Lock in InSAR Time Series of Distributed Scatterers

LOSS researchers Philip Conroy and Ramon Hanssen published a new paper in IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing:

They introduce the term loss-of-lock to describe a specific form of coherence loss that results in the breakage of a synthetic aperture radar interferometric (InSAR) time series. Loss-of-lock creates a specific pattern in the coherence matrix of a multilooked distributed scatterer (DS) by which it may be detected. Along with identification, they introduce a new DS processing methodology that is designed to mitigate the effects of loss-of-lock by introducing contextual data to assist in the time-series processing. This methodology is of particular relevance to regions that suffer from severe temporal decorrelation, such as northern peatlands. They apply their new method to two subsiding cultivated peatland regions in The Netherlands which previously proved impossible to monitor using DS InSAR techniques. Their results show a very good agreement with in situ validation data as well as spatial correlation between regions and the natural terrain.