Entering a New Era of InSAR: Advanced Techniques and Emerging Applications

Interferometry Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) provides unique capabilities to map regional/global topography and deformation of the Earth’s surface and has led to a broad spectrum of deformation monitoring applications. In order to adapt to various challenging monitoring environments, researchers have made tremendous innovations to deal with issues such as atmospheric and ionospheric effects, loss of coherence due to large displacements, geometric distortions and unwrapping errors. Owing to recent technical and methodological advances, the Earth’s surface deformation, ranging from earthquake ruptures, volcanic eruptions, landslides, glaciers, to groundwater storage variations, mining subsidence and infrastructure instability can now be mapped anywhere in the world at high spatial and temporal resolutions. This special issue received a set of contributions highlighting recent advances in methodologies and applications of InSAR to ground deformation monitoring. We aim to present overviews of both the state of the art of SAR/InSAR techniques and the next generation of applications across the broad range of deformation monitoring applications.