Mine subsidence monitoring: A comparison among Envisat, ERS and JERS-1

This paper reports the progress of the Envisat CAL/VAL Project No 1078. Subsidence in an underground coal mining region southwest of Sydney, Australia, has been monitored using ERS and JERS-1. Seven Envisat images have been acquired in various imaging modes from both ascending and descending passes over the same mining region. More Envisat images have been scheduled and will be acquired in the future. This paper demonstrates that the mine subsidence have been measured by utilising differential interferometric synthetic aperture radar (DInSAR) technique with the C- and L-band SAR images from ERS and JERS-1 satellites. Tandem differential InSAR analysis has revealed 1 cm subsidence in 24 hours with a resolution of +/- 3 mm. The RMS error for DInSAR measured subsidence against ground survey data is 1.4 cm using the JERS-1 repeat-pass images.