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Modern Technologies for Landslide Monitoring and Prediction pp 181–208Cite as

Monitoring Landslide Activities in the Three Gorges Area with Multi-frequency Satellite SAR Data Sets

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Abstract

Thousands of landslides are distributed along Yangtze River and its tributaries in the Three Gorges area from Chongqing Municipality in the west to Hubei Province in the east (P.R. China). Since the construction and regular operation of the Three Gorges Dam in the past two decades, many ancient landslides have been reactivated and some new landslides were formed along with the unprecedentedly huge water-level changes. Monitoring landslide activities has then been considered as a high-priority task for geological disaster prevention and management in the reservoir area, while traditional monitoring methods can hardly meet the requirements. In this chapter, we investigated the applications of several methods using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) datasets in landslide monitoring in the Three Gorges area. Multifrequency satellite SAR data sets acquired by ENVISAT/ASAR, ALOS/PALSAR, and TerraSAR-X from different orbits were analyzed to retrieve historic deformations of a few typical landslides. The experimental results suggested that SAR Interferometry (InSAR) methods can be effectively used to monitor slow-moving landslides, while pixel offset tracking method is more suitable for detecting deformation of fast-moving landslides. Furthermore, qualitative correlation analyses indicated that variation of reservoir water level, particularly the rapid water-level decrease due to discharge, should be identified as a key driving factor for landslide deformation in the Three Gorges area.

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Acknowledgments

This work was financially supported by the National Key Basic Research Program of China (Grant Nos. 2013CB733205 and 2013CB733204), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 41271457, 61331016, and 41021061), and the Major Research Program of the Three Gorges Region Geologic Disaster Protection (Grant No. SXKY3-6-4). The authors thank ESA for providing ENVISAT/ASAR data through the Dragon-3 program (id 10569), JAXA for providing ALOS/PALSAR data through ALOS RA3 scientific research projects (PI520 and PI547), and DLR for providing TerraSAR-X data through TerraSAR-X AO project (GEO0606).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

    Lu Zhang, Mingsheng Liao, Timo Balz, Xuguo Shi & Yanan Jiang

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  1. Lu Zhang
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  2. Mingsheng Liao
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  3. Timo Balz
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  4. Xuguo Shi
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  5. Yanan Jiang
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Correspondence to Lu Zhang .

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  1. College of Surveying & Geo-Informatics, Department of Architecture, Built Environment and Construction Engineering,, Tongji University, Shanghai, Politecnico di Milano, Italy, China

    Marco Scaioni

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Zhang, L., Liao, M., Balz, T., Shi, X., Jiang, Y. (2015). Monitoring Landslide Activities in the Three Gorges Area with Multi-frequency Satellite SAR Data Sets. In: Scaioni, M. (eds) Modern Technologies for Landslide Monitoring and Prediction. Springer Natural Hazards. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45931-7_10

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