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InSAR detection of residual settlement of an ocean reclamation engineering project: a case study of Hong Kong International Airport

  • Special Section: Original Article
  • Regional Environmental Oceanography in the South China Sea and Its Adjacent Areas (REO-SCS): I
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Abstract

Man-made land or islands that are reclaimed from the sea are suitable for building airports, harbors, and industry parks for material transportation because of their broad air and land spaces. However, the reclaimed foundation settlement process is of public concern, including the continuous impact of ocean processes on its stability. The majority of the buildings and facilities of Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA) are built on a reclaimed foundation. The reclaimed foundation has been in residual settlement since completion of the filling project in 1994. In this study, we use persistent scatterer interferometry (PSI) and ENVISAT (European Satellite) advanced synthetic aperture radar (ASAR) data to detect the residual settlement rates from 19 April 2006 to 9 January 2008. We use ground truth data to develop empirical correction models for correcting systematic biases in the ASAR PSI-detected settlement rates. The corrected data follow the Lorentz distribution well, implying that the residual settlement process is dominated by two modes or categories of settlement rates. The first category represents a relatively stable state and the second category represents a continuous settlement state. A ground settlement rate map of HKIA shows that an area of the Passenger Terminal Building and an area of the Southern Runway are two relatively stable areas. There are two major continuous settlement areas. One covers the airport Midfield. Another is along the coastline, implying that attention should be paid to impacts of ocean processes on the stability of airport foundations.

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Acknowledgments

This research was partially supported by the Research Grants Council (RGC) of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region though Project CUHK4665/06H and a Direct Grant of the Chinese University of Hong Kong though Project 2020927. The authors would like to thank the Airport Authority Hong Kong for providing ground truth data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Resources and Environmental Sciences, Key Laboratory of Geographic Information Science, Ministry of Education, East China Normal University, Shanghai, 200062, People’s Republic of China

    Qing Zhao & Wei Gao

  2. Institute of Space and Earth Information Science, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, People’s Republic of China

    Hui Lin & Kin Yeung

  3. Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305-9505, USA

    Howard A. Zebker & Albert Chen

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  1. Qing Zhao
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  2. Hui Lin
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  3. Wei Gao
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  4. Howard A. Zebker
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  5. Albert Chen
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  6. Kin Yeung
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Correspondence to Qing Zhao.

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Zhao, Q., Lin, H., Gao, W. et al. InSAR detection of residual settlement of an ocean reclamation engineering project: a case study of Hong Kong International Airport. J Oceanogr 67, 415–426 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10872-011-0034-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10872-011-0034-3

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