Topography-correlated atmospheric signal mitigation for InSAR applications in the Tibetan plateau based on global atmospheric models

Atmospheric heterogeneity mainly exposes itself as tropospheric-phase delay in Satellite Interferometric Synthetic Aperture radar (InSAR) observations, which smears or even overshadows the deformation component of InSAR measurements. In this study, we estimated the performance of four Global Atmospheric Models (GAMs), i.e. European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) Reanalysis v5 (ERA5), ERA-Interim (ERA-I), Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications v2 (MERRA2) and Generic Atmospheric Correction Online Service for InSAR (GACOS), for tropospheric-phase delay reduction in InSAR applications in the Tibetan plateau, of which ERA5 is the latest GAM released by ECMWF. We demonstrated the effectiveness of Atmospheric Phase Screen (APS) correction using the four GAMs for more than 700 Sentinel-1 Terrain Observation by Progressive Scans interferograms covering two study areas in the southern (R1) and northwest margins (R2) of the Tibetan plateau. Topography-correlated signals have been widely observed in these interferograms, which are most likely due to the APS effects. We calculated the Standard Deviations (SD) and Pearson's Correlation Coefficients (r) between InSAR Line of Sight measurements and topography before and after applying APS correction. The results show that the SDs of non-deformation areas from the GAMs decrease to approximately 4 mm from around 10 mm and 12 mm originally on average for R1 and R2, respectively, and the r after the APS correction are reduced below 0.4 from around 0.8 for the selected interferometric pairs. In addition, as the newly released GAM, ERA5 has similar performance with GACOS products and outperforms other models generally. This suggests that GAMs, particularly ERA5, have great potential in the APS correction for InSAR applications in the Tibetan plateau.

Automated summary

This study evaluated the performance of four Global Atmospheric Models (GAMs) for tropospheric-phase delay reduction in InSAR applications on the Tibetan plateau. ERA5 was found to have similar performance to GACOS products and generally outperformed other models, indicating great potential for GAMs, particularly ERA5, in APS correction for InSAR applications in the Tibetan plateau.