Ground subsidence often accompanies underground excavation activities, and monitoring surface subsidence is essential to increase safety, avoid activity stoppages and provide timely detection of incipient damage to buildings and infrastructure. It has become an essential tool for mitigating the socio-economic risks related to activities that produce ground surface deformation.
The instrumentation used for monitoring surface deformation in and around excavation operations is generally based on conventional survey techniques (total stations, levelling, GPS receivers, ground-based radars) but none of these usually offer the high-density, bird’s-eye view of the movement areas provided by satellite synthetic aperture radar interferometry (InSAR).
