Challenges and Prospects to Time Series Burst Overlap Interferometry (BOI): Some Insights From a New BOI Algorithm Test Over the Chaman Fault

Abstract

How to obtain millimeter-scale along-track deformations using phase measurements is still a pending question for InSAR community. Although Burst Overlap Interferometry (BOI) technique makes this question seem tractable, most applications of BOI still focus on extracting centimeter-scale deformations for co-seismic cases. To further improve measurement accuracy, here we propose a new time series BOI algorithm towards maximizing the performance of BOI and obtaining as high accuracy of the along-track deformations as possible. This algorithm has three major steps. The first step is to enhance BOI phase signal-to-noise ratio using our newly proposed phase estimator. In the second step, we apply a strain model-based method to further suppress the phase noise and rescue more data points. In the third step, a misregistration correction procedure which considers plate motion is applied to mitigate BOI time series bias. We tested our proposed algorithm over the Chaman fault. Although the derived millimeter-scale deformations demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, experimental results show that decorrelation and ionospheric disturbance are still two great challenges of BOI techniques.

Resolving the slip-rate inconsistency of the northern Dead Sea fault

“…Burst-overlap interferometry (BOI) from Sentinel-1 radar data, on the other hand, can provide more precise along-track observations, albeit only along narrow swaths where radar bursts overlap ( 43 , 44 ). Time-series analysis of a large number of BOI data has been shown to allow retrieval of interseismic velocities as low as 5 mm/year ( 20 , 45 , 46 ); thus, here we extend our work from the Gulf of Aqaba ( 20 ) and use BOI time-series analysis (see Materials and Methods) for the entire DSF with data from 2014 to 2021 to provide critical constraints on the interseismic deformation and geodetic slip rates along the DSF.…”