Land Subsidence Monitoring in Azar Oil Field Based on Time Series Analysis

Zahra Mirzaii | Mahdi Hasanlou | Sami Samieie-Esfahany | Mahdi Rojhani | Parviz Ajourlou

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URL :   http://research.shahed.ac.ir/WSR/WebPages/Report/PaperView.aspx?PaperID=116846
Date :  2019/09/16
Publish in :     International Electronic Conference on Remote Sensing
DOI :  https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.3390/ECRS-3-06190
Link :  http://dx.doi.org/https://doi.org/10.3390/ECRS-3-06190
Keywords : Azar oil field, time series analysis, persistent scatterers, land subsidence

Abstract :

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Azar oil field is located to the east of the city of Mehran, Ilam. The tank of this oil field is shared by Iraq’s oil field whose name is Badra where oil extraction started in 2014, and they have maximized its oil exploration since 2017. Iran started oil exploration in 2017. In this study, we estimated the land surface deformation in Azar oil field using persistent scattering interferometry (PSI) in order to determine the corresponding subsidence source. PSI is a method of time series analysis used to measure various surface deformations. The Stanford Method for Persistent Scatterers (StaMPS) package was employed to process 50 ascending Sentinel-1A satellite images collected between 2016 and 2019, and 50 descending Sentinel-1A satellite images were collected between 2014 and 2019 to extract horizontal and vertical displacement components from the Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) LOS (line-of-sight) displacement. The results showed that the maximum displacement rate in the Iran-Iraq joint oil field between 2016 and 2019 was 15 mm in the vertical direction. Moreover, the maximum displacement rate measured in the horizontal direction was 30 mm. The vertical deformation confirms typical patterns of subsidence caused by oil extraction, and the horizontal deformation occurred due to considerable precipitation events after a drought period, as well as the presence of sand layers at different depths of the earth.

http://dx.doi.org/https://doi.org/10.3390/ECRS-3-06190