DinSAR coseismic deformation measurements of the Mw 8.3 Illapel earthquake (Chile)

Abstract

The beginning of radars goes back to the 1930s where its main boost was related to the second world war. Nowadays, the techniques associated with radars are focused around a vast variety of civil, geodetic, and military applications. The development of the synthetic aperture principle, in the 1950s and 1960s, gave birth to a lot of new applications, and together with the technological progress of the last decades, the technique of interferometry with synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data became one of the most powerful ones for sensing remotely, with high quality and a vast spatial coverage. We used Sentinel-1 data and the differential interferometry SAR (DinSAR) technique to map and measure the surface deformation related to the 2015 Mw 8.3 Illapel earthquake (Chile). We also validated the results, by analysing the temporal variation of coordinates acquired from global navigation satellite system observations and projecting them in the geometry of the SAR system. Using this application we prove the DinSAR technique to be useful and powerful for the observation and analysis of surface deformation caused by the release of stress during the Mw 8.3 Illapel earthquake. It proved to be an efficient tool to detect and map the surface deformation with high spatial resolution in an approximate area of 20,000 km2.