A Case Study on Offshore Platform Deformation Monitoring by using InSAR

¹ Department of Mechanical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, Seri Iskandar, Malaysia
² Department of Civil Engineering, Kasetsart University (KU), 50 Thanon Ngam Wong Wan, Khwaeng Lat Yao, Khet Chatuchak, Bangkok, Thailand

^* Corresponding author: asharifuddin2@gmail.com

Abstract

The Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) technique is well established technique for onshore applications such as landslide, mining, volcano, urban and dam deformation monitoring. However, the ability of the InSAR technique for the offshore application particularly on the oil platform deformation monitoring is still a pending question. Therefore, a study needs to be conducted in order to assess the feasibility of the InSAR technique for monitoring the deformation of offshore platform. In this study, an advanced InSAR technique called Stanford Method of Persistent Scatterer (StaMPS) was utilized to process a stack of TerraSAR-X data. A mask has been developed as an additional module in the StaMPS to remove the noise on the ocean and relax the assigned condition imposed on the processing parameters. The results show that the number of persistent scatterer (PS) points on the offshore platform increased from 15 to 22 points and a smoother pattern of the velocity estimation could be seen when masking was applied to identify the deformation. Furthermore, some limitations and possible solutions of the PSI technique on the offshore platform application are summarized in this paper to guide future users on this application.