Ground Displacement and Building Damage Estimation of the 2017 Kermanshah Earthquake Using SAR Remote Sensing

Abstract

We used two synthetic aperture radar (SAR) datasets with different resolution to monitor the Kermanshah earthquake displacements and the buildings in Sarpole-Zahab town. We have obtained two high resolution dual-polarized (HH and HV) ALOS-2 images in strip map (SM) mode and three dual-polarized (VV and VH) Sentinel-1 images in interferometric wide (IW) mode from ascending orbits. The incidence angle of ALOS-2 and Sentinel-1 datasets were 36.2° and 38.9°, respectively. Temporal baseline of ALOS-2 dataset is 42 days, whereas pre-event and co-seismic temporal baselines of Sentinel-1 dataset are 13 and 18 days, respectively. Human activities after disasters increase and deteriorate the damage proxy maps which sometimes make the damage proxy maps meaningless. Thus, we need post-event images with shortest gaps with the event. Since the revisit cycle of ALOS-2 is rather large, we only use two ALOS-2 images to calculate ground displacement