PSDEFOPAT - Towards Automatic Model Based PSI Post-Processing

The deformation of the surface of the earth is triggered by numerous naturally occurring and artificial processes such as global isostatic adjustment, aseismic and coseismic movement, varying amounts of groundwater or gas stored underground, and soil consolidation due to urbanization. Monitoring these surface deformations is essential to understand the underlying processes and provide authorities and the public with hazard assessments. Remote sensing techniques, such as Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI), have the capability of mapping these deformations. Besides a spatial analysis of the deformation patterns, PSI also provides information on their temporal evolution. Post-processing strategies to analyze the displacement time series have gained interest in recent years. This paper presents our PSI post-processing strategy, which incorporates different deformation models and automatically chooses the best-fitting one based on statistical tests.