Topography and Displacement of Polar Glaciers from Multi-temporal Sar Interferograms: Potentials, Error Analysis and Validation

This paper describes a new technique to simultaneously estimate topography and motion of polar glaciers from multi-temporal SAR interferograms. The approach is based on a combination of several SAR interferograms in a least-squares adjustment using the GaussMarkov model. For connecting the multi-temporal data sets, a spatio-temporal model is proposed that describes the properties of the surface and its temporal evolution. Rigorous mathematical modeling of functional and stochastic relations allows for a systematic description of the processing chain. It also is an optimal tool to parameterize the statistics of every individual processing step, and the propagation of errors into the final results. Within the paper theoretical standard deviations of the unknowns are calculated depending on the configuration of the data sets. The influence of gross errors in the observations and the effect of non-modeled error sources on the unknowns are estimated. A validation of the approach based on real data concludes the paper.