Leveraging Persistent Scatterers for Recurrent Dam Deformation Monitoring

Abstract:

Internationally, there are over 57,000 large dams in the world, with a wide array of safety standards for each county, or even sub regions of those countries. This has enforced a need to monitor dams remotely for management and mitigation purposes. Weather reports are a common source of dam oversight, as many collapses can be attributed to a structural change caused by moisture, such as heavy periods of rain, in either the dams themselves, their tailing piles, or surrounding geology. With an increase in irregular weather patterns as well as other collapse mechanisms, differing methods are being approached for stable time series monitoring in tandem with weather data. Synthetic Aperture Radar tools, such as Persistent Scatterers, have been leveraged to observe the surface deformation of dam faces, as well as surrounding terrain. In the past, the gathering and processing of this data was time consuming, but with modern day resources outputs are viewed and reported immediately after satellite image collection. This method has been used on multiple high risk dams in this work to highlight areas of major change over time. Monitoring can be done on a regional or site specific scale with mm accuracy for surface changes. This study will provide a view on the use of Persistent Scatterers for large scale monitoring including the pros and cons of the implementation of these tools for site management.