Characterization of land subsidence in Tabriz basin (NW Iran) using InSAR and watershed analyses

Abstract

Iran as a semi-arid and arid country has a serious water challenge in the recent decades. While water demand is increasing, as a consequence, land subsidence due to excessive water extraction is happening in major basins of the country. Recently the land subsidence has been proposed as an environmental problem in the country and thus important projects on this matter have been conducted. For example several basins in the country have been studied using SAR data and their result had a great deal on water management section. This paper studies the large-scale immature land subsidence in the Tabriz basin (NW Iran) using the permanent scatterer synthetic aperture radar interferometry technique with the small baseline InSAR approach and watershed analysis. InSAR time series analysis of 17 Envisat advanced SAR images between 2003 and 2010 reveals three oval-shaped regions of subsidence. The recognized water wells in the study area are categorized into two groups (sub-basin 1 and 2) based on watershed analysis in the TB and are compared with InSAR results. InSAR time series from Kriging interpolation method are also compared with GPS time series of permanent TABZ station which suggests that the land subsidence only is growing in the basin far away from the Tabriz city.

A new GIS-based data mining technique using an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) and k-fold cross-validation approach for land subsidence susceptibility mapping

“…At the same time, the demand for water is increasing due to population growth and more intensive agriculture activities. Therefore, land subsidence occurs in most of the basins of the country because of high ground water extraction (Karimzadeh 2015). Land subsidence is a severe problem in the plains of northwestern Iran.…”

“…This study area is located between the Alborz zone to the East and Azerbaijan zone to the North and West, and it belongs to the Central Iran structural units (Barzegar et al 2017). The Marand plain is part of the Khazar basin, which is one of the six major hydrological basins in Iran and covers most parts of Northern Iran (Karimzadeh 2015). From a geological point of view, the study area coincides with the same lithological formation, namely a high level piedmont fan and valley terrace deposits Q ft1 belonging to the Quaternary age (Khaleghi and Shahverdizadeh 2014).…”

“…Agriculture in the region requires a huge amount of surface and underground water. Over the last years, the mean annual precipitation amounts have declined in the study area (Hajalilou and Khaleghi 2009), thus increasing the need to use excessive groundwater extraction (Karimzadeh 2015). This is the main contributing factor leading to the reduction of groundwater levels in this area (Fakhri et al 2015).…”

“…A GIS-MCDA method was also used by Ghorbanzadeh et al (2017) to identify areas that are prone to land subsidence in the Marand plain, while Dehghan-Soraki et al (2015) applied ASAR and PALSAR data to analyze and measure the land surface change rates caused by subsidence. Karimzadeh et al (2013) and Karimzadeh (2015) used the same type of data in order to distinguish the surface deformation in another basin in the Northwest of Iran.…”

Building Damage Assessment Using Multisensor Dual-Polarized Synthetic Aperture Radar Data for the 2016 M 6.2 Amatrice Earthquake, Italy

“…In the last decade, increasing use has been made of remote-sensing data to assess the damage caused by earthquakes, floods, and other disasters [1][2][3][4]. In particular, space-borne remote sensors, including optical or synthetic aperture radar (SAR) devices, permit the inspection of large areas at costs that are affordable for various institutes and organizations.…”