Evaluation of synthetic aperture radar interferometric techniques for monitoring of fast deformation caused by underground mining exploitation

EPOS-PL+ is the Polish national realization of the European Plate Observing System (EPOS) project that aims to build a multidisciplinary infrastructure. It allows integration of a variety of geoscience expertise and techniques to better understand the geohazard related to the underground mining of coal in the Upper Silesian Coal Basin (USCB) in Poland. The study case in this project is the Marcel Mine, located within USCB, where the detected subsidence for the analyzed period of four months reaches 91 cm. Various interferometric processing techniques demonstrated some advantages and also some limitations in the context of mining deformation measurement, including accuracy, spatial resolution, detectable deformation rate, atmospheric delay, and  ability to detect the maximal deformation gradients. This is especially important from a mining perspective. Therefore, we investigated three different interferometric processing techniques to monitor fast mining deformation in the Marcel hard coal mine area. More specifically, we used conventional DInSAR, Small Baseline Subsets (SBAS), and Persistent Scattered Interferometry (PSInSAR). The result confirmed that none of these methods can be considered as the best. The DInSAR approach allows capturing the maximal deformation gradient, which was not possible with the PSInSAR and SBAS approaches. On the contrary, PSInSAR and SBAS allow us to provide less noisy and reliable results in the area of safety pillars.