Complete three-dimensional coseismic displacements due to the 2021 Maduo
earthquake in Qinghai Province, China from Sentinel-1 and ALOS-2 SAR
images
Abstract
On 22ed May 2021 (local time), an earthquake of Ms7.4 struck Maduo
county in Qinghai Province, China. This was the largest earthquake in
China since the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake. In this study,
ascending/descending Sentinel-1 and advanced land observation
satellite-2 (ALOS-2) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images were used to
derive the three-dimensional (3-D) coseismic displacements of this
earthquake. We used the differential interferometric SAR (InSAR,
DInSAR), pixel offset-tracking (POT), multiple aperture InSAR (MAI), and
burst overlap interferometry (BOI) methods to derive the displacement
observations along the line-of-sight (LOS) and azimuth directions. To
accurately mitigate the effect of ionospheric delay on the ALOS-2 DInSAR
observations, a polynomial fitting method was proposed to optimize
range-spectrum-split-derived ionospheric phases. In addition, the 3-D
displacement field was obtained by a strain model and variance component
estimation (SM-VCE) method based on the high-quality SAR displacement
observations. Results indicated that a left-lateral fault slip with the
largest horizontal displacement of up to 2.4 m dominated this
earthquake, and the small-magnitude vertical displacement with an
alternating uplift/subsidence pattern along the fault trace was more
concentrated in the near-fault regions. Comparison with the global
navigation satellite system data indicated that the SM-VCE method can
significantly improve the accuracy of the displacements compared to the
classical weighted least squares method, and the incorporation of the
BOI displacements can substantially benefit the accuracy of north–south
displacement. In addition to the displacements, three coseismic strain
invariants calculated based on the strain model parameters were also
investigated. It was found that the eastern and western parts of the
faults suffered more significant strains compared with the epicenter
region.