Updated understanding of landslides kinematics along the Thompson River Valley using satellite InSAR

• Author / Creator

  Soltanieh, Amir

• Geohazards threaten human’s well-being in many different ways. Landslide, as a common geohazard in both natural and anthropogenic man-made features all around the world, generally, damage many infrastructures, nature balance, animal habitat and cause even loss of lives for many creatures as well as human beings when they occur.
  Transportation corridors along valleys are example of the most vulnerable areas in landslide occurrences. The Thompson River Valley South of town of Ashcroft in British Columbia, Canada is one of the most important transportation corridors within Canada which connects the Port of Vancouver to other parts of Canada to haul goods from and into this port by Canadian Pacific and Canadian National Railways. This corridor hosts several landslides along the valley. Monitoring the landslides along this valley can reduce risk of landslide on the transportation system of Canada by alerting of the existence of any possible landslide in this area or their acceleration. Improvements in remote sensing helps geotechnical engineers to monitor massive areas by using satellite radar interferometry (InSAR). This technology helps to observe terrain movements near real time with milimeter accuracy for massive aerial extents and revisiting times of less than a week.
  The aerial coverage of Insar, and having different sensors monitoring the same location from different angles o view, provide an opportunity to better understand the 3-dimentional motion of the ground surface that can allow an enhanced kinematic interpretation of the landslide.
  In this research updating interpretation of kinematic of landslides along the Thompson River valley south of the town of Ashcroft in British Columbia, Canada is presented. For this purpose, I used the data gathered from the Sentinel 1 satellite’s constellation, that it is a radar-based technology for measuring ground movement. I estimated the true ground displacement vector
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  through geometric combination of different LOS and general assumptions of the expected kinematics of landslides in this thesis. The recorded 2 years LOS changes from different orbits of Sentinel 1 constellations are used in this research to have better understanding of ground’s movements in the area of investigation . First, this method is applied for the Ripley landslide, which has been investigated by pervious researchers and the results of recorded data by installed GPS system is used , to validate the accuracy and reliability of the result of this method. The results of the applied method agreed with the reported displacement of the Ripley landslide by GPS system both in magnitudes and directions of movements. , The method is then used to estimate the true ground displacement vectors for other landslides along the Thompson River valley with more impacts on the railways along the valley. The monitoring results of the research allowed for an enhancement in the understanding of the kinematics of the landslides in the study area. Furthermore, this method was tested and validated for this area and provides a tool to extract useful information from Satellite InSAR data.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Landslides
  • Remote monitoring
  • Thompson River Valley

• Graduation date

  Fall 2022

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Science

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-ptpx-ec13

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Library with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.