Monitoring Land Subsidence in Guatemala City Using Time-Series Interferometry

Monitoring land subsidence is important to prevent and manage disasters. The extent of land subsidence can be measured by various ways and one of them is PSI technique. Guatemala City has geologically weak structure and suffered from disasters such as sinkhole and landslide. The purpose of this study was to measure wide range of relative movement in Guatemala City and to analyze obtained values. C-band Sentinel-1 A/B data during November 2014 to March 2018 were used in this study. By gathering information from both ascending and descending paths, relative movements were decomposed from line of sight of each path to vertical and horizontal component. As a result 4 regions in Guatemala City showed significant subsidence patterns with average vertical movement going down with a scale of 14 mm/year.