Abstract
Agriculture in the Central Valley, California, is made possible by surface water management infrastructure and the groundwater supply. However, groundwater overdraft leads to land subsidence, which in turn threatens flood control and water delivery infrastructure. Monitoring, modeling, and managing land subsidence are crucial to ensure the water supply and its infrastructure remains accessible for the future. Detection of land subsidence is difficult because it is a gradual deformation of the land surface over broad areas that can extend 10s of kilometers. Interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) is used to detect deformation over time using a series of repeat images that penetrate cloud cover. Satellite and airborne InSAR time series techniques identify and monitor the development of both valley-wide subsidence zones and individual, localized risks to infrastructure.
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Acknowledgements
Processing of the spaceborne SAR subsidence measurements reported herein was funded by the California Department of Water Resources. The airborne UAVSAR acquisitions and analysis were funded by a combination of NASA and the California Department of Water Resources. This work was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with NASA and DWR. UAVSAR data are courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech. The Alaska Satellite Facility (http://www.asf.alaska.edu/) archives and distributes the UAVSAR and Sentinel-1 data (which were acquired by the European Space Agency) used in this report.
Copyright 2019 California Institute of Technology. U.S. Government sponsorship acknowledged.
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Jones, C.E., Farr, T.G., Liu, Z., Miller, M.M. (2021). Measuring Subsidence in California and Its Impact on Water Conveyance Infrastructure. In: Singhroy, V. (eds) Advances in Remote Sensing for Infrastructure Monitoring. Springer Remote Sensing/Photogrammetry. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59109-0_9
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