The Filling Process of an Embankment Dam Monitored with PSI

Embankment dams are often used to supply their surrounding region with freshwater, hydro-energy or manage floods and are thus of great importance for the region. However, should the dam body burst, it would be an economic loss for the re-gion and threaten the environment, infrastructure, and human life. Therefore, monitoring embankment dams is crucial, es-pecially during the first filling. It is the time period in which the structure experiences the load of the impounded water for the first time. The technique Persistent Scatterer Interferom-etry is well-positioned for this task. Persistent Scatterer Inter-ferometry is a remote sensing technique and thus facilitates infrastructure monitoring in hardly accessible areas. In addition, the technique provides two-dimensional information on the surface deformation instead of sporadic pointwise infor-mation. One end product is a map of the mean velocity of the surface deformation of the observation target in line of sight of the sensor for a specific observation period. In this paper, we present the challenges of creating a surface deformation map for the Parapeiros-Peiros dam. The dam body is excepted to experience a significant amount of defor-mation within a small area during its first filling, which makes identifying persistent scatterers challenging. Hence, we also discuss different approaches described in the literature to select persistent scatterers and their suitability for this specific application.