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Coastal sea level is observed at tide gauge stations, which usually also serve as height reference stations for national networks. One of the main issues with using tide gauge data for sea level research is that only a few stations are connected to permanent GNSS stations needed to correct for vertical land motion. As a new observation technique, absolute positioning by SAR using off the shelf active radar transponders can be installed instead. SAR data for the year 2020 are collected at 12 stations in the Baltic Sea area, which are co-located to tide gauges or permanent GNSS stations. From the SAR data, 3D coordinates are estimated and jointly analyzed with GNSS data, tide gauge records and regional geoid height estimates. The obtained results are promising but also exhibit some problems related to the electronic transponders and their performance. At co-located GNSS stations, the estimated ellipsoidal heights agree in a range between about 2 and 50 cm for both observation systems. From the results, it can be identified that, most likely, variable systematic electronic instrument delays are the main reason, and that each transponder instrument needs to be calibrated individually. Nevertheless, the project provides a valuable data set, which offers the possibility of enhancing methods and procedures in order to develop a geodetic SAR positioning technique towards operability.

Traditionally, sea level is observed at tide gauge stations, which usually also serve as height reference stations for national leveling networks and therefore define a height system of a country. One of the main deficiencies to use tide gauge data for geodetic sea level research and height systems unification is that only a few stations are connected to the geometric network of a country by operating permanent GNSS receivers next to the tide gauge. As a new observation technique, absolute positioning by SAR using active transponders on ground can fill this gap by systematically observing time series of geometric heights at tide gauge stations. By additionally knowing the tide gauge geoid heights in a global height reference frame, one can finally obtain absolute sea level heights at each tide gauge. With this information the impact of climate change on the sea level can be quantified in an absolute manner and height systems can be connected across the oceans. First results from applying this technique at selected tide gauges at the Baltic coasts are promising but also exhibit some problems related to the new technique. The paper presents the concept of using the new observation type in an integrated sea level observing system and provides some early results for SAR positioning in the Baltic sea area.

Among different sets of constraints and hazards that have to be considered in the management of cities and land use, land surface subsidence is one of the important issues that can lead to many problems, and its economic consequences cannot be ignored. In this study, the ground surface deformation of Gävle city in Sweden is investigated using the Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI) technique as well as analyzing the historical leveling data. The PSI technique is used to map the location of hazard zones and their ongoing subsidence rate. Two ascending and descending Sentinel-1 datasets, collected between January 2015 and May 2020, covering the Gävle city, were processed and analyzed. In addition, a long record of a leveling dataset, covering the period from 1974 to 2019, was used to detect the rate of subsidence in some locations which were not reported before. Our PSI analysis reveals that the center of Gävle is relatively stable with minor deformation ranged between −2 ± 0.5 mm/yr to +2 ± 0.5 mm/yr in vertical and east–west components. However, the land surface toward the northeast of the city is relatively subsiding with a higher annual rate of up to −6 ± 0.46 mm/yr. The comparison at sparse locations shows a close agreement between the subsidence rates obtained from precise leveling and PSI results. The regional quaternary deposits map was overlaid with PSI results and it shows the subsidence areas are mostly located in zones where the subsurface layer is marked by artificial fill materials. The knowledge of the spatio-temporal extents of land surface subsidence for undergoing urban areas can help to develop and establish models to mitigate hazards associated with such land settlement.

Monitoring environmental hazards, owing to natural and anthropogenic causes, is an important issue, which requires proper data, models, and cross-validation of the results. The geodetic satellite missions, for example, the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and Sentinel-1, are very useful in this respect. GRACE missions are dedicated to modeling the temporal variations of the Earth’s gravity field and mass transportation in the Earth’s surface, whereas Sentinel-1 collects synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data, which enables us to measure the ground movements accurately. Extraction of large volumes of water and oil decreases the reservoir pressure and form compaction and, consequently, land subsidence occurs, which can be analyzed by both GRACE and Sentinel-1 data. In this paper, large-scale groundwater storage (GWS) changes are studied using the GRACE monthly gravity field models together with different hydrological models over the major oil reservoirs in Sudan, that is, Heglig, Bamboo, Neem, Diffra, and Unity-area oil fields. Then, we correlate the results with the available oil wells production data for the period of 2003–2012. In addition, using the only freely available Sentinel-1 data, collected between November 2015 and April 2019, the ground surface deformation associated with this oil and water depletion is studied. Owing to the lack of terrestrial geodetic monitoring data in Sudan, the use of GRACE and Sentinel-1 satellite data is very valuable to monitor water and oil storage changes and their associated land subsidence over our region of interest. Our results show that there is a significant correlation between the GRACE-based GWS anomalies (ΔGWS) and extracted oil and water volumes. The trend of ΔGWS changes due to water and oil depletion ranged from –18.5 ± 6.3 to –6.2 ± 1.3 mm/year using the CSR GRACE monthly solutions and the best tested hydrological model in this study. Moreover, our Sentinel-1 SAR data analysis using the persistent scatterer interferometry (PSI) method shows a high rate of subsidence, that is, –24.5 ± 0.85, –23.8 ± 0.96, –14.2 ± 0.85, and –6 ± 0.88 mm/year over Heglig, Neem, Diffra, and Unity-area oil fields, respectively. The results of this study can help us to control the integrity and safety of operations and infrastructure in that region, as well as to study the groundwater/oil storage behavior.

Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) capability to detect slow deformation over terrain areas is limited by temporal decorrelation, geometric decorrelation and atmospheric artefacts. Multitemporal InSAR methods such as Persistent Scatterer (PS-InSAR) and Small Baseline Subset (SBAS) have been developed to deal with various aspects of decorrelation and atmospheric problems affecting InSAR observations. Nevertheless, the applicability of both PS-InSAR and SBAS in mountainous regions is still challenging. Correct phase unwrapping in both methods is hampered due to geometric decorrelation in particular when using C-band SAR data for deformation analysis. In this paper, we build upon the SBAS method implemented in StaMPS software and improved the technique, here called ISBAS, to assess tectonic and volcanic deformation in the center of the Alborz Mountains in Iran using both Envisat and ALOS SAR data. We modify several aspects within the chain of the processing including: filtering prior to phase unwrapping, topographic correction within three-dimensional phase unwrapping, reducing the atmospheric noise with the help of additional GPS data, and removing the ramp caused by ionosphere turbulence and/or orbit errors to better estimate crustal deformation in this tectonically active region. Topographic correction is done within the three-dimensional unwrapping in order to improve the phase unwrapping process, which is in contrast to previous methods in which DEM error is estimated before/after phase unwrapping. Our experiments show that our improved SBAS approach is able to better characterize the tectonic and volcanic deformation in the center of the Alborz region than the classical SBAS. In particular, Damavand volcano shows an average uplift rate of about 3 mm/year in the year 2003–2010. The Mosha fault illustrates left-lateral motion that could be explained with a fault that is locked up to 17–18 km depths and slips with 2–4 mm/year below that depth.

We greatly appreciate the thoughtful comments by Andrew Sowter and Francesca Cigna [1] on our paper [2]. Unfortunately, we overlooked the ISBAS acronym during the revision process of the article. Therefore, we would suggest to use the acronym of ESBAS (Enhanced Small BAseline Subset) for our method presented in Vajedian et al. [2]