Image Library

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has been performing observations with the Phased Array type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar-2 (PALSAR-2) aboard the Advanced Land Observing Satellite-2 (ALOS-2, "DAICHI-2") for monitoring the effects of an earthquake struck Nepal on April 25, 2015 (local time). The emergency observations were requested from Sentinel Asia and the International Charter.

We applied an interferometric analysis to the PALSAR-2 data obtained with ScanSAR mode before (May 31, 2015) and after (April 28, 2015) earthquake to detect the deformation associated with the earthquake. The ScanSAR interferometry, which has been made possible by the highly synchronized observation beams of PALSAR-2, enable us to monitor over 350 km swath at once.

Figure 1 shows the whole interferogram. Colored fringes denote the change of the line-of-sight (LoS) distance (distance between the satellite and the ground) between April 28 and March 31. In the lower left part (the east from Kathmandu), fringes possibly caused by the earthquake are visible. Large fringes in the right part of the figure are probably not tectonic fringes but remaining orbital fringes^*1 and ionospheric effects^*2.

Figure 2 is the close up image of the deformation part in the Figure 1. There are two fringes which patterns are opposite. The northern fringes show extension of the LoS distance approximately 2 cycles (24 cm). Contrarily, the southern fringes show shrink of the LoS distance approx. 4 cycles (48 cm). These patterns indicate that the deformation reached to about 170 km east-southeast from the epicenter.