Atmospheric Phase Screen Estimation with TerraSAR-X Data in Hong Kong

The permanent scatterers (PS) technique is a powerful remote sensing technology that exploits a long series of synthetic aperture radar data for monitoring ground deformations with millimeter accuracy on a high spatial density of ground targets. One of the major limitations of this technique is due to atmospheric effects, and in particular to high Water Vapor (WV) variability. As a consequence, to successfully apply interferometric techniques, the atmospheric WV delay must be estimated and removed from radar data. On the contrary, this PS technique could be explored as a tool to study high-resolution spatial-temporal water vapor characteristics. In this work, we investigate the atmosphere effects with a series of high-resolution TerraSAR-X data and PSInSAR technique in Hong Kong. We will present some of the preliminary results as well as the discussions over the stratification and turbulence estimation.