Terrain Monitoring in China via Ps-qps Insar: Tibet and the Three Gorges Dam

In this paper we report the results of two analyses carried out by the Topographic Measurement Team (Project ID 5297) within the European Space Agency (ESA) and National Research Center of China (NRSCC) Dragon 2 cooperation program. In the first analysis, the DEM of a small area in the Tibetian Plateau has been estimated processing 11 L-band ALOS images with the QuasiPermanent Scatterers (QPS) technique, proving the capability of the technique to extract elevation maps from small sets of coherent interferograms. In the second study, several small landslides have been identified by processing X-band Cosmo SkyMed images around the Three Gorges Dam, from ascending and descending orbits, using the Permanent Scatterers approach. The results here reported contribute in assessing the usefulness of multi-temporal Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (InSAR) analyses for terrain monitoring in China.