Identification and monitoring landslides in Longitudinal Range-Gorge Region with InSAR fusion integrated visibility analysis

In high mountain canyon regions, SAR geometric distortion in imaging side may have an inevitable impact on InSAR deformation information, so the effective deformation information acquisition is critical for landslide identification and deformation mechanisms analysis. The landslide deformation around the reservoir of Gushui Hydropower Station located in upstream of the Lancang River has been focused on in the study. Using SAR satellite parameters and topographic information, the visibility analysis of deformation in radar line-of-sight (LOS) direction has been carried out, and a method to obtain LOS effective deformation information based on the visibility analysis has been proposed. The small baseline subsets (SBAS) technique is used to process the L-band and C-band SAR data, and the area affected by the geometric distortion in the InSAR result is masked to obtain the deformation information of the effective deformation region. The landslide identification analysis in the reservoir area has been carried out based on the effective deformation information in LOS direction. Thirteen landslides have been identified, and ten of them are new ones. A new large unstable area (New Zhenggang landslide) has been found near the Zhenggang landslide. The geological survey and displacement time series of the Zhenggang landslide reveals that it is in pull-type landslide mode, that is, due to the local instability of the leading edge of a landslide, the support of the trailing edge may be weakened, which may result in the landslide gradually developing backwards and upwards, and finally becoming a large landslide. The impact of peak rainfall and cumulative rainfall during the rainy season on landslide deformation has been verified in this paper. It indicates that the cumulative precipitation is the dominant factor causing the deformation of the landslide, and it shows that the landslide begins the deformation acceleration period about 12 days after the peak precipitation. The results have shown that the proposed visibility analysis method for extracting the effective deformation information of InSAR results can significantly improve landslide identification and analysis in complex terrain.

Automated summary

In this study, SAR technology and topographic information were used to analyze landslide deformation near the reservoir of the Gushui Hydropower Station. A new method was proposed to extract effective deformation information, which significantly improved landslide identification and analysis in complex terrain. The results showed the dominant role of cumulative rainfall in causing landslide deformation, with deformation acceleration occurring about 12 days after peak precipitation.