In recent years, advanced remote sensing techniques based on DInSAR methodologies have become one of the key methods to monitor ground deformations on mining areas. The analysis of key assets on a mine such as open pit slopes, waste dumps, leach pads, tailings dam and other mine infrastructures provides a global vision of the deformation that is valuable information in terms of security, operations, mine development and future planning.
Advanced PSI InSAR algorithms have been employed to detect ground deformation (from millimetric to centimetric) in several mining rock slopes stabilities programs in order to get information of the behavior of the rock mass during excavation and other mining operations of the area of interest. This paper presents a full InSAR application on a real open air mine site applied in a monitoring program.
This article is focused on the use Differential synthetic aperture radar interferometry DInSAR methodology, PSI technique SqueeSAR and other SAR applications such as correlation of amplitude images, RMT, applied in the detection of rock masses displacement monitoring. The paper presents the main characteristics of the methodologies applied for the detection of ground motion in a wide range of magnitudes, from millimeters to meters and includes examples of real case applications for monitoring rock masses.
The use of DInSAR and SAR methodologies for detecting ground deformation has increased in the last decade in the mining sector for two main reasons. Firstly, these methodologies provide a large amount of measurement data that are easily comparable with other classical geodesic measurements on going in the mining sector. Secondly, these methodologies provide the advantage of covering large spatial areas at low cost, a regular acquisition of measures over time and the availability of large archives of historical data to perform retrospective studies.
