- The number of natural hazard such as earthquake, volcanic eruption, flood, gound subsidence, land slide, etc. has continuously increased globally and become more and more serious to local people. For example, an official death toll and missing peopl ...
- The number of natural hazard such as earthquake, volcanic eruption, flood, gound subsidence, land slide, etc. has continuously increased globally and become more and more serious to local people. For example, an official death toll and missing people by Sichuan Earthquake, China, in May 2008 has reached 70,000 and more than twenty million houses have been collapsed. However, even the extent of the surface fault movement is still unknown.
- International efforts and research to monitor and mitigate the natural hazard using spaceborne remote sensing have become popular. While the success of optic spaceborne remote sensing very much depends on weather conditions, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) observation is independent of weather and solar conditions. Therefore, the SAR is more useful for specifically monitoring natural hazard.
- In Korea, flood, violent typhoon and land slide have occurred annually and caused extensive damage to property and occasionally resulted in loss of life. Site selection for atomic power plant and atomic waste disposal is another big geologic issue in Korea. While Korea is now building Korean Multi-Purpose Satellite-5 (KOMPSAT-5) with a main payload of a high resolution SAR system, the applications of the SAR system to geologic hazard is yet to be studied.
- One of recently developed SAR application techniques is "radar interferometry" (or InSAR), which enable the system to measure subtle surface deformation with an accuracy of an order of a few centimeter over a few hundred kilometers. The applications of InSAR technique are focused on geoscience studies including earthquake, volcanic eruption, ground subsidence, and glacial monitoring in association with a study of global warming and carbon cycle. In short, InSAR plays an important role for natural hazard monitoring and mitigation.
- During the research period, InSAR applicatoiins to ground sbsidence, faults and volcano were carried out and meaningful results have been achieved. The main results were published in international journals.
- To promote collaboration with oversea laboratories, we made an proposal in topics of Himalayan glacier.