Editorial for the Special Issue: “Ground Deformation Patterns Detection by InSAR and GNSS Techniques”

Abstract

In the last two decades, the rapid growth in continuous Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) networks and improvements in Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) imaging allowed the acquisition of continuous and spatially extensive datasets over large regions of Earth, significantly increasing the range of geoscience applications. In addition, the promising results obtained by the scientific community and the free availability of data, which permitted drastic cost reductions, have drawn increasing interest from the administrative managing office for the mapping and monitoring of ground deformation issues. This Special Issue aims to provide a general overview of some geoscience applications of GNSS and InSAR techniques which are commonly used to study the surface deformation related to co- and post-seismic deformation, subsurface movements of magma beneath active volcanoes, soil deformation (e.g., natural/anthropic uplift or subsidence), monitoring of landslide, monitoring of industrial settlements, the motion of ice sheets, etc. The GNSS technique provides a set of 3D geodetic observations at a limited number of points on the ground surface. The continuous technological development in GNSS equipment currently allows collecting measurements at higher rates (up to 100 Hz), offering a wide range of new applications for solid and fluid Earth investigations. The InSAR technique provides a spatially dense set of geodetic observations of ground deformation in the viewing geometry of the satellite sensor, and with a temporal sampling limited to the satellite orbital revisit (up to 6 days with the Sentinel constellations). Any deformation of the ground surface can be measured by comparing two radar images of the same area, collected at different times from approximately the same position in space. InSAR processing advancements also allowed multi-temporal analyses, which sensibly improved the investigation of long-term deformation events.