Abstract

The Black Sea coast of Bulgaria is well known as an active landslide area across which various landslides extend. Monitoring the real behavior of landslides has not often been conducted due to technical difficulties and cost issues, although it is essential to reveal the mechanism of these landslides and to solve the problems they cause. In this paper, SBAS-DInSAR is applied to monitor the landslide displacements along the northern Black Sea coast. The results are compared with the field observation results described in the official annual reports of landslides issued in Bulgaria and other published papers. It is found that the SBAS-DInSAR results show a good agreement with the actual behavior and verify its applicability for monitoring landslides in extensive areas along the northern Black Sea coast.

Introduction

The Black Sea coast of Bulgaria is well known as an active landslide area across which various landslides extend [1]. A lot of research has been done from geological and engineering viewpoints, and some countermeasure works have been performed for stabilizing the landslide behavior and protecting people’s lives and properties. On the other hand, monitoring the real behavior of landslides has not often been conducted due to technical difficulties and cost issues, although it is essential to reveal the mechanism of these landslides and to solve the problems they cause.

Differential Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (DInSAR) [2] has the potential to be an efficient, effective, and economical method for monitoring the landslide behavior in this extensive area. With this method, it is possible to measure the ground surface displacements with the accuracy of a few centimeters or less from satellite data taken more than 500 to 700 km away from the Earth’s surface. The accuracy can be improved by the temporal analysis of the Small Baseline Subset (SBAS) or Permanent Scatters (PS) DInSAR using a large amount of satellite data. The other advantages of DInSAR are that it can monitor extensive areas without the use of any sensors on the ground surface. Actually, DInSAR has already been applied to this area to observe the displacement distribution [3], [4].

In this paper, SBAS-DInSAR [5] is applied to monitor the landslide displacements in the Balchik and Kavarna area, along the northern Black Sea coast, and the results of SBAS are compared with the actual ground behavior described in the official annual report of landslides in Bulgaria [6] in order to confirm the validity of the method.

This content is only available via PDF.
You can access this article if you purchase or spend a download.