Inferring Tectonic Plate Rotations From InSAR Time Series

Creators: Liu, Yuan‐Kai¹; Yunjun, Zhang^{1, 2, 3}; Simons, Mark¹

1. California Institute of Technology
2. Aerospace Information Research Institute
3. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Abstract

Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) provides constraints on lithospheric kinematics at high spatial resolution. Interpreting InSAR-derived deformation maps at continental scales is challenged by long-wavelength correlated noise and the inherent limitation of measuring relative displacements within the data footprint. We address these issues by applying corrections to InSAR time series to estimate ground velocity fields with millimeter-per-year precision over hundreds of kilometers. We use these velocity fields to determine the angular velocity of the local tectonic plate, assuming negligible long-wavelength vertical and intra-plate deformation. The uncertainty of the angular velocity is primarily influenced by observational errors and the limited imaging geometries available. Using the Arabian plate as an example, this work demonstrates the potential to improve plate motion models and evaluate intra-plate deformation in regions with sparse ground-based instrumentation.

Copyright and License

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Acknowledgement

We appreciate the constructive feedback from reviewers Jeff Freymueller and Marie-Pierre Doin. Thanks to Cunren Liang, Rishav Mallick, Yujie Zheng, Lijun Zhu, Leonid Pereiaslov, Shaozhou Liu, and Joann Stock for fruitful discussions. This work was partially supported by NASA Grant 80NSSC22K1910 as well as from the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology program for work carried out at the California Institute of Technology.

Data Availability

Copernicus Sentinel-1 SLCs are provided by the European Space Agency, accessed from ASF DAAC (2020/2023) via Seamless SAR Archive (SSARA, 2023). Interferograms are processed with stackSentinel (Fattahi et al., 2017) in the InSAR Scientific Computing Environment (Rosen et al., 2012). Time-series analysis is performed using MintPy (Yunjun et al., 2019). The ocean tidal loading correction is based on global ocean tidal model TPXO09 Atlas (Egbert & Erofeeva, 2002). Our plate motion modeling codes are available on Liu (2025). The time-series and velocity data are available on Liu et al. (2025). Figures were made with Matplotlib (Hunter, 2007), Cartopy (Met Office, 2010/2015), and Geopandas (Jordahl et al., 2020).

Supplemental Material

Supporting Information S1 (PDF)

Files

Geophysical Research Letters - 2025 - Liu - Inferring Tectonic Plate Rotations From InSAR Time Series.pdf

Files (15.5 MB)

Name	Size	Download all
Geophysical Research Letters - 2025 - Liu - Inferring Tectonic Plate Rotations From InSAR Time Series.pdf md5:7f2022cf9e0b1fca6beea40ec9d7ee1b	7.3 MB	Preview Download
2025gl115137-sup-0001-supporting information si-s01.pdf md5:39c8563afe9d41e1734f0196be0aca9c	8.2 MB	Preview Download

	All versions	This version
Views	0	0
Downloads	0	0
Data volume	0 Bytes	0 Bytes