This paper describes several geodetic studies that consolidate the reliability and precision of monitoring subsidence due to hydrocarbon production: the deployment of Integrated Geodetic Reference Stations (IGRS); the application of high resolution InSAR; the comparison of different GNSS processing methodologies; the implementation of an efficient InSAR stochastic model, and the framework of integrated geodetic processing (levelling, GNSS, InSAR). The advances that have been made are applicable for any other subsidence monitoring project.@en

An approach to improve orbital state vectors by orbit error estimates derived from residual phase patterns in synthetic aperture radar interferograms is presented. For individual interferograms, an error representation by two parameters is motivated: the baseline error in cross-range and the rate of change of the baseline error in range. For their estimation, two alternatives are proposed: a least squares approach that requires prior unwrapping and a less reliable gridsearch method handling the wrapped phase. In both cases, reliability is enhanced by mutual control of error estimates in an overdetermined network of linearly dependent interferometric combinations of images. Thus, systematic biases, e. g., due to unwrapping errors, can be detected and iteratively eliminated. Regularising the solution by a minimum-norm condition results in quasi-absolute orbit errors that refer to particular images. For the 31 images of a sample ENVISAT dataset, orbit corrections with a mutual consistency on the millimetre level have been inferred from 163 interferograms. The method itself qualifies by reliability and rigorous geometric modelling of the orbital error signal but does not consider interfering large scale deformation effects. However, a separation may be feasible in a combined processing with persistent scatterer approaches or by temporal filtering of the estimates. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.

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