Ground-Based InSAR on Turtle Mountain

What is Ground-Based InSAR?

Ground-based interferometric synthetic aperture radar (GB-InSAR) uses radar waves to map ground movement. The technique is fundamentally identical to satellite-based InSAR, but instead of acquiring the images from several hundred kilometres away, the images are acquired by a radar moving on a rail within a couple of kilometres of the area.

The satellite-based system collects images every few weeks, whereas the ground-based system acquires images as often as every five minutes. This allows continuous monitoring of movement ranging from millimetres per year to metres per hour in velocity. The working range is up to four kilometres in line-of-site distance.

Ground-Based InSAR on Turtle Mountain

In 2009, the Geotechnical Engineering Department at the University of Alberta purchased an IBIS-L GB-InSAR system from IDS with the support of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. In mid-September 2009, staff from Alberta Geological Survey and a student from the University of Alberta installed the system on Turtle Mountain. This is the first operational GB-InSAR system in North America. It is able to obtain movement information from most of the unstable upper portion of the mountain, as well as much of the lower slope.

Results

By summer 2010, we hope to have obtained enough data to produce a detailed map of the ongoing movements on Turtle Mountain. We will integrate the data from the GB-InSAR system with the measurements from the dGPS and laser-ranging surveys.