The role of weather models in mitigation of tropospheric delay for SAR interfermetry

Abstract

High resolution numerical weather models have recently raised a great interest in the InSAR community for atmospheric phase screen (APS) mitigation. Following the research carried out in [1], in this study we focus on investigating the sensitivity of WRF (Weather Research and Forecasting) predictions to the model parameter settings which may substantially affect the result of water vapor modeling and to different boundary conditions. We validate the model predictions using atmosphere-only interferograms as well as radiosonde records. Our result shows that the radiosonde records (on average) agree very well with the WRF predictions based on our new model settings. However, in terms of spatio-temporal delay variation, the new settings do not always lead to a better prediction and the correction of atmospheric delay is case dependent. Therefore, we conclude that WRF lacks the reliability to correct the realistic APS in interferograms.