Ground settlement of Chek Lap Kok Airport, Hong Kong, detected by satellite synthetic aperture radar interferometry

Satellite synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometry is used to investigate the slowly accumulating ground settlement at the new Chek Lap Kok Airport in Hong Kong. Most of the land occupied by the airport was reclaimed from the sea and therefore certain ground settlement in the area has been expected. A pair of ERS-2 SAR images spanning nearly a year is used in the study. The high spatial resolution (20 mx20 m) ground settlement map derived indicates that the settlement that occurred in the area over the time period is as large as 50 mm. The SAR measurement results agree with the levelling measurements at some benchmarks in the area to well within 1 cm(rms error), and the overall correlation between the two types of results is 0.89. The paper presents some brief background of interferometric SAR, and outlines the data processing methods and results.