Optimizing Characterization of an Urbanized Creeping Landslide with Advanced Multitemporal Interferometric SAR

This study explores the effectiveness of three advanced multitemporal interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) algorithms for characterizing spatial and temporal features of the School Creek landslide in southern Tasmania, Australia: Persistent Scatterer InSAR (PSI), Quasi-PSI (Q-PSI), and Homogeneous Distributed Scatterers-InSAR (HDS-InSAR). We processed coarse-resolution Sentinel-1 and high-resolution RADARSAT-2 imagery spanning April 2019 to, respectively, December 2021 and August 2022. Both sensors satisfactorily reveal landslide extent and produce similar non-linear deformation time-series, with displacement rates of up to 10 mm/year. Nonetheless, RADARSAT-2 higher resolution enables more precise spatial characterization. The correlation coefficients between Q-PSI and HDS-InSAR deformation rates are 0.84 and 0.88 for Sentinel-1 and RADARSAT-2, respectively, and both techniques provide superior displacement-record density compared to PSI.