Ancient Babylon city site monitoring using PSInSAR

The Ancient Babylon City has been included in the World Heritage List during the (43) session of the World Heritage Committee (Baku / Azerbaijan) 2019. Babylon site suffers from the consequences of ground instability due to the unbaked mud brick’s, employed to build the whole city, low tensile strength and brittleness particularly at the foundation level. Hence, it is suggested to employ Persistent Scatterers Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PSInSAR) as a monitoring method that can offer a survey for the whole site (1208.8 hectare) in order to conduct, in the second stage, an in-situ detailed monitoring survey. However, there are some limitations of applying PSInSAR in a limited area, a few square km such as the Ancient Babylon city, because it may produce a limited PS density or cannot give solutions at all. To overcome such issue, it is proposed, in this research, to separate processing for different years and summing the outcomes of the processing up mathematically. The results of the proposed method show improvement in the PS density and agree with the deformation locations compared to general PSInSAR.