Possibilities to make measurements of ground subsidence more effective, using dInSAR, GNSS and levelling

Abstract: Ground subsidence is today very common. It can occur due to man-made or natural causes. Today, it is most common that subsidence occurs in urban areas, and there the causes are almost exclusively man-made, including groundwater extraction, construction under or above ground. This can lead to damage of buildings or other constructions and lead to large costs for reparation. To avoid this, subsidence must be detected in an early stage. Therefore, this thesis work will study the most effective way to detect and measure subsidence using dInSAR, GNSS and levelling. The thesis work will contain a literature study, a compilation of cases comparing the methods and a quantitative comparison of data, called case Stockholm. The main focus of case Stockholm is to compare the RMS error for the datasets and to determine how well the linear regression of the datasets cohere. The literature study and the case compilation presents the strengths and weaknesses of the different methods, where dInSAR’s strength is the ability to measure large areas at once while the weakness is the inability to detect small movements within a large movement. The possibility to measure individual points of interest is the strength of both GNSS and levelling, where the most time-consuming method, levelling, also has the highest accuracy. In case Stockholm, the linear regression for dInSAR mostly follows the linear regression for GNSS and levelling. However, irregular levelling measurements that do not follow the general ground subsidence is missed by dInSAR and the amplitude of the dInSAR measurements differ from both GNSS and levelling measurements. This confirms the strengths and weaknesses mentioned in the literature study. The conclusion that can be drawn from this is that the most effective way of using dInSAR, GNSS and levelling is to first screen large areas for any movement using dInSAR. Later only the areas that display movement of any sort is measured with either GNSS or levelling depending on demands on accuracy.