Measurement of Time-Series Surface Deformation at New Orleans Using Small Baseline Subset (SBAS) Method

New Orleans located in the estuary of the Mississippi River was attacked by Hurricane Katrina and suffered big flood on August 2005. Since unconsolidated Holocene to middle Miocene strata is the main basement rocks, land subsidence has been occurred steadily due to soil compaction and normal faulting. It was reported that the maximum subsidence rate from 2002 to 2005 was -29 mm/yr. Many studies in the area have been carried out for understanding the subsiding and potential risks caused by ground subsidence are weighted by the fact that a large area of the city is located below the mean sea level. A small baseline subset (SBAS) method is applied for effectively measuring time-series LOS (Line-of sight) surface deformation from differential synthetic aperture radar interferograms in this study. The time-series surface deformation at New Orleans was measured from RADARSAT-1 SAR images. The used dataset consists of twenty-one RADARSAT-1 fine beam mode images on descending orbits from February 2005 to February 2007 and another twenty-one RADARSAT-1 standard beam mode images on ascending orbits from January 2005 to February 2007. From this dataset, 25 and 38 differential interferograms on descending and ascending orbits were constructed, respectively. The vertical and horizontal components of surface deformation were extracted from ascending and descending LOS surface deformations. The result from vertical component of surface deformation indicates that subsidence is not significant with a mean rate of -3.1${\pm}$3.2 mm/yr.