Abstracts:Reports on GRSS society chapter activities.

Abstracts:Reports on GRSS society chapter activities.

Abstracts:Moving into 2020 marks a number of milestones (if only based on its simplified numerology). The beginning of a new year and a new decade is always a good opportunity for retrospection, especially when progress has been made and is underway. The year 2019 marked both the last year that the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS) Women in GRSS (WinGRSS) would be a committee on its own and the launch of the Inspire, Develop, Empower, Advance (IDEA) Committee (http://www.grss-ieee.org/community/idea/). WinGRSS has not gone away. Rather, it is now part of IDEA, which represents a broader and stronger mission of diversity and inclusion within the GRSS.

Abstracts:Presents information on the 2020 IEEE GRSS Data Fusion Contest.

Abstracts:Early warning systems (EWSs) to detect and monitor landslides are a great challenge. They are important due to the high cost of catastrophic landslides and are challenging because of the difficulty in identifying a diverse range of landslide-triggering factors. While there has been a very limited number of successes, recent advances in Earth observation (EO) from the ground, aircraft, and space have dramatically improved our ability to detect and monitor active landslides. A growing body of geotechnical theory suggests that prefailure behavior can offer clues to the location and timing of impending catastrophic failures. In this article, we use two recent landslides in China as case studies to demonstrate that satellite radar observations can be used to detect deformation precursors to catastrophic landslides and that early warnings can be achieved with real-time, in situ observations. We propose a novel and exciting framework that employs EO technologies to build an operational landslide EWS.

Abstracts:Since 2000, interferometric synthetic-aperture radar (InSAR) has been an effective tool to map 2D water-level changes beneath vegetated wetlands with a high spatial resolution and centimetric accuracy. In the last two decades, SAR images obtained from different wavelengths and polarization modes have been tested across various wetland systems, and InSAR-derived water-level-change maps have improved our understanding of wetland hydrology and hydraulics. In this article, we discuss the feasibility and challenges of applying InSAR to wetland areas, present a comprehensive review of InSAR applications for hydraulic and hydrologic analysis, and discuss future trends.

Abstracts:Interferometric methods are drivers of the recent exponential growth in the use of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) for monitoring both natural and anthropogenic hazards. Since the first use of interferometric SAR (InSAR) in the late 1990s to detect deformations associated with earthquakes and volcanoes, important developments have improved sensor performance and data-processing capabilities for the extraction of information of interest in geophysical applications. Here, we describe the improvements that have enabled the 3D reconstruction and monitoring of buildings, with reference to their protection against and prevention of risks. We focus on buildings affected by systematic displacements related to natural hazards-specifically, landslides. We address the straightforward use of InSAR methods in the detection and characterization of the hazard as well as in higher-level exploitation for geotechnical and structural studies and, more generally, vulnerability analysis.

Abstracts:Ground surface deformation monitoring, parameter inversion, and forward prediction are essential to mining deformation mechanism interpretation and its related geohazard assessment. Interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) has the capability to measure surface deformation in a very wide area with high spatial resolution, low cost, and high efficiency, which traditional geodetic surveying techniques cannot accomplish. Consequently, InSAR offers great potential for promoting, or even revolutionizing, traditional mining deformation monitoring and forward prediction, with great efforts having been made in this field.

Abstracts:Ground-based differential interferometry synthetic aperture radar (GB-DInSAR) is a promising deformation measurement technology developed in the last 20 years. The GBDInSAR system is capable of sensing millimeter-scale deformations in the range of tens of meters to several kilometers from the target area in a continuous, all-weather environment. This article introduces in detail the basic principles of GB-DInSAR imaging, conventional signal models, deformationinversion algorithms, system working mode, existing typical systems, and application examples of high-precision deformation measurement in different scenarios. Moreover, this article systematically summarizes the latest research progress of GB-DInSAR technology and its future direction of development.

Abstracts:Over the past two decades, the time-series interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) technique has been developed to estimate surface deformation parameters. Because of its ability to monitor large-scale deformation with millimeter accuracy, the time-series InSAR technique has been applied in many fields, such as urban infrastructure monitoring, mining subsidence, and landslides. The obtained, long-term, time-series cumulative deformation is of great value to the study of its regularity.