ISSN 10693513, Izvestiya, Physics of the Solid Earth, 2014, Vol. 50, No. 4, pp. 575–586. © Pleiades Publishing, Ltd., 2014. Original Russian Text © V.O. Mikhailov, E.A. Kiseleva, E.I. Smol’yaninova, P.N. Dmitriev, V.I. Golubev, Yu.S. Isaev, K.A. Dorokhin, E.P. Timoshkina, S.A. Khairetdinov, 2014, published in Fizika Zemli, 2014, No. 4, pp. 120–130. 575 1. INTRODUCTION Satellite radar interferometry is nowadays one of the actively developing directions in the Earth’s stud ies from space. The images taken by the interferomet ric synthetic aperture radars (InSAR) are used for con structing digital elevation models (DEM) and estimat ing subtle displacements of the Earth’s surface and engineering objects. The first estimates of the surface displacements were obtained with the use of interfero grams generated based on two radar images obtained from locally parallel orbits (the so called differential interferomety, DInSAR). The interferograms show the relative phase shift of two reflected radar signals measured during the repeated surveying of the same object. This phase shift is due to the displacement of the reflecting object during the time interval between the surveys; however, it also depends on the changes in the atmospheric conditions, vegetation, and snow cover. The errors of orbit determination and DEM also contributed to the phase shift. This significantly reduces the possibilities of the methods of differential interferometry, although there are extensive publica tions on determining the displacement fields in the regions of the earthquakes, exploitation of oil and gas deposits, on the glaciers, and volcanoes by DInSAR methods. The review of some results can be found, for instance, in (Mikhailov et al., 2010; 2012). Various methods for solving the problems of differ ential interferometry have been developed so far. One of the suggested approaches is the persistent scatterer (PS) techniques. The main idea of these methods (referred to as the PSInSAR techniques) is to simul taneously analyze a series of interferograms, on which only the pixels with a stable, in a certain sense, behav ior are identified and used in the further study (Fer retti, Prati, and Rocca, 2001). The existing algorithms of PSInSAR methods differ, inter alia, by the mathe matical formalism of stable behavior. For example, in the methods suggested in (Ferretti, Prati, and Rocca, Some Problems of Landslide Monitoring Using Satellite Radar Imagery with Different Wavelengths: Case Study of Two Landslides in the Region of Greater Sochi V. O. Mikhailov a , E. A. Kiseleva a , E. I. Smol’yaninova a , P. N. Dmitriev a , V. I. Golubev a , Yu. S. Isaev b , K. A. Dorokhin b , E. P. Timoshkina a , and S. A. Khairetdinov a a Schmidt Institute of Physics of the Earth, Russian Academy of Sciences, ul. Bol’shaya Gruzinskaya 10, Moscow, 123995 Russia email: mikh@ifz.ru b OAO Lenmetrogiprotrans Scientific Research and Design Institute, ul. Bol’shaya Moskovskaya 2, St.Petersburg, 191002 Russia Received February 19, 2014; in final form, March 3, 2014 Abstract—The problems of processing and interpreting the data provided by radar satellite interferometry for the conditions of landslides covered by vegetation are analyzed in two case studies of landslides in the North ern Caucasus in the region of Kepsha and Mamaika villages in the vicinity of the railway tunnels. The esti mates of the displacement fields are obtained by the method of persistent scatterers using the StaMPS pro gram package. The fiveyear experience of landslide monitoring at hillsides shows that in the unfavorable conditions of satellite radar interferometry, proper selection of the strategy of satellite image processing is vital. In the present paper, we discuss, in particular, the crop selection, the selection of the master image, ref erence area, and digital elevation model. For the landslide located in the sparsely populated region near Kep sha village, we used the data from the ascending and descending tracks of the longwavelength ALOS and shorterwavelength ENVISAT satellites. For the landslide in the region of Mamaika village with a large num ber of different buildings serving as good scatterers for radar signals, we used the images from the ENVISAT and from TerraSAR satellite, which transmits even shorter waves. The average lineofsight (LOS) displace ment velocities V LOS for the landslide near Kepsha village measure at most 100 mm per annum, which means that this landslide has remained stable at least since 2004. The landslide in Mamaika village is significantly more active. The average LOS displacement velocities in the active part of this landslide attain 60 mm per annum. The artificial corner reflector installed on the segment of the landslide where natural scatterers of radar signal are absent made it possible to estimate the LOS displacement velocity on this segment of the slope at 44 mm per annum. DOI: 10.1134/S1069351314040107 2 2 2