Baseline Refinement for Topographic Phase Estimation using External DEM

Multitemporal interferometric SAR has became an useful geodetic tool for monitoring Earth's surface deformation, generation of precise DEM, and land cover classification even though there still exist certain constraints such as temporal and spatial decorrelation effects, atmospheric artifacts and inaccurate orbit information. The Korea where nearly all areas are heavily vegetated, JERS-1 SAR has advantages in monitoring surface deformations and environmental changes in that it uses 4-times longer wavelength than ERS-l/2 or RADARSAT SAR system. For generating differential SAR interferogram and differential coherence image fer deformation mapping and temporal change detection, respectively, topographic phase removal process is required utilizing a reference inteferogram or external DEM simulation. Because the SAR antenna baseline parameter for JERS-1 is less accurate than those of ERS-l/2, one can not estimate topographic phases from an external DEM and the residual phase appears in differential interferogram. In this paper, we examined topographic phase retrieval method utilizing an external DEM. The baseline refinement is carried out by minimizing the differences between the measured unwrapped phase and the reference points of the DEM.