Enhancing dam deformation monitoring through the integration of InSAR and GNSS

Dam infrastructures face ongoing environmental and operational pressures from hydrostatic pressure and geological activity. Even small-scale deformations that remain undetected can cause massive structural breakdowns in future which could lead to dam failures and result in economic and environmental disasters. Maintaining the long-term stability of a dam structure demands precise and continuous subsidence and structural deformation monitoring to prevent potential risks. The advanced geospatial methods which are InSAR and GNSS able to serve this purpose. InSAR able to produce large-scale deformation maps with millimetre-level precision, while GNSS delivers highly precise point-based measurements at high temporal resolution. This study proposes a conceptual framework that integrates InSAR and GNSS to enhance dam deformation monitoring by utilizing their combined advantages. The accuracy of structural assessments improves when extensive spatial deformation data from InSAR is combined with point-based measurements from GNSS. This approach using InSAR and GNSS presents a cost-effective and scalable solution for continuous monitoring which essential for detecting structural risks of dam infrastructure. Through theoretical analysis of this integration technique, it demonstrates how geospatial analysis can revolutionize safety dam monitoring. The conceptual framework introduced in this paper creates essential groundwork which supports and help future developer or research to develop scalable systems that manage sustainable infrastructure and continuously track dam deformation subsidence in a cost-effective manner.