Investigation of the ground displacement in Saint Petersburg, Russia, using multiple-track differential synthetic aperture radar interferometry

Global sea level rise and local land subsidence might exacerbate the risk of flooding in coastal plains. Among other cities, this is also the case for the high-latitude city of St. Petersburg, which has long been threatened by flood events. To protect the urban area from storm surges, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1978 approved the construction of the 25 km long Flood Prevention Facility Complex (FPFC), which was completed in 2011. The risk of flooding in the city area of St. Petersburg is amplified by the fact that large sections of the coastal area have been reclaimed from the sea. In this study, we investigate the temporal evolution of the ground displacement in St. Petersburg. To this end, we perform an extended analysis based on the application of a simplified version of the differential interferometric synthetic aperture radar technique, known as the minimum acceleration (MinA) approach. The MinA algorithm is a multi-satellite/multi-track interferometric combination technique that allows working with multiple sets of SAR images. The method allowed generation of time series of two-dimensional (2-D) (i.e. East-West and Up-Down) deformation of the terrain by processing two sequences of Sentinel-1A/B (S-1A/B) SAR images acquired from 2016 to 2018, along the ascending and descending flight passes. The Small BAseline Subset (SBAS) algorithm was independently applied to the two sets of SAR data to generate the relevant Line-Of-Sight (LOS)-projected ground deformation time series. Subsequently, the LOS-projected deformation products were geocoded and jointly combined. The results indicate that the deformation in the city is predominantly vertical (i.e. it is subsiding) with a maximum subsidence rate of about 20 mm/year corresponding to the newly sea-reclaimed lands. Finally, the error budget of the retrieved 2-D deformation time series has also been addressed.