Joint pixels InSAR for health assessment of levees in New Orleans

The integrity and reliability of levees, earthen dams and flood-control infrastructure are essential components of homeland safety. The development of a potentially affordable satellite-based interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) technique for use in a new health assessment framework to monitor, manage and ensure the safety of levees and other systems of flood-control infrastructure is presented in this paper. To estimate the yearly rate of deformation of both the concrete and grass-covered levee structures with sub-wavelength accuracy, a new InSAR technique referred to as joint pixels InSAR (JPInSAR) is proposed. The corresponding results of applying JPInSAR to TerraSAR-X Stripmap data from February 2009 to October 2011 for widespread settlement monitoring in the New Orleans area are presented herein. The presented data processing chain significantly increases the number of pixels where the deformation-rate can be estimated as compared to the number of pixels that can be processed by the classical persistent scatterer technique. Local measurements from GPS and ShapeAccelArrays (SAAs), which were installed in June 2012, will be integrated with the satellite-based InSAR measurements into a global-local network to monitor the response of flood-control levees.