Surface Deformation of Alpine Terrain Derived by Ps-insar Technique on the Siachen Glacier

Accumulation gain is essential for mass balance of valley glaciers in the Karakoram Himalayas. The higher elevation of this area received snowfall(>1000 cm · yr−1) annually, while the snowfall occupies 95% of total precipitation (75-150 cm · yr−1). Meanwhile, the air temperature ranging from -20 to -40 °C, during DecemberFebruary, is also very suitable for accumulation of glacier mass. We choose ALOS/PALSAR L-band data from April, 2007, to September, 2009, in the Siachen glacier to generate the interferograms and calculate their displacements spatially and temporally. In this study, the surface deformation of upper part of the Siachen glacier located in central Karakoram is estimated by using PSInSAR technique. Here, we implement the PS method, which uses spatial correlation of interferogram phase to find pixels with low-phase variance in the terrain. Prior knowledge of temporal variations in the deformation rate is not required for their identification. Through times series analysis of the interferograms we were able to reduce the impact of digital elevation model errors and extract the real surface change signal.