Mitigating atmospheric noise for InSAR using a high resolution weather model

A high resolution weather model is used to predict atmospheric delays for the acquisition times of synthetic aperture radar images over Hawaii. Refraction of the radar by water vapor in the atmosphere in Hawaii leads to apparent ground‐motions with wavelengths and magnitudes similar to the actual ground motions generated by tectonic and volcanic processes. We examine the potential for a weather model to help characterize the atmospheric component in InSAR scenes and find that in the best cases it models the observed delays well, reducing the variance at wavelengths of 30 km and greater by ∼60%, while even in the worst cases it provides an independent means of quantifying the expected variance in the image due to the atmosphere.