Critical Factors for the Application of InSAR Monitoring in Ports

Ports pose distinctive monitoring challenges due to harsh marine conditions, mixed construction typologies, and heterogeneous ground conditions. These factors complicate the routine use of satellite InSAR, especially when medium-resolution scatterers must be reliably attributed to specific assets for risk and asset management decisions. In current practice, persistent and distributed scatterer (PS/DS) points are often interpreted in map view without an explicit positional uncertainty model or systematic linkage to three-dimensional infrastructure geometry. We present an end-to-end Differential InSAR framework tailored to large ports that fuses medium-resolution Sentinel-1 Level 2 Co-registered Single-Look Complex (L2-CSLC) stacks with high-resolution airborne LiDAR at the post-processing stage. For the Port of Bahía de Algeciras (Spain), we process 123 Sentinel-1A/B images (2020–2022) in ascending and descending geometry using PS/DS time-series analysis with ETAD-like timing corrections and RAiDER tropospheric/ionospheric mitigation. LiDAR is then used to (i) derive look-specific shadow/layover masks and (ii) perform a whitening-transformed nearest-neighbor association that assigns PS/DS points to LiDAR points under an explicit range–azimuth–cross-range (RAC) uncertainty ellipsoid. The RAC standard deviations (σr,σa,σc) are derived from the effective CSLC range/azimuth resolution and from empirical height correction statistics, providing a geometry- and data-informed prior on positional uncertainty. Finally, we render dual-geometry red–green composites (ascending to R, descending to G; shared normalization) on the LiDAR point cloud, enabling consistent inspection in plan and elevation. Across asset types, rigid steel/concrete elements (trestles, quay faces, and dolphins) sustain high coherence, small whitened offsets, and stable backscatter in both looks; cylindrical storage tanks are bright but exhibit look-dependent visibility and larger cross-range residuals due to height and curvature; and container yards and vessels show high amplitude dispersion and lower temporal coherence driven by operations. Overall, LiDAR-assisted whitening-based linking reduces effective positional ambiguity and improves structure-specific attribution for most scatterers across the port. The fusion products, geometry-aware linking plus three-dimensional dual-geometry RGB, enhance the interpretability of medium-resolution SAR and provide a transferable, port-oriented basis for integrating deformation evidence into risk and asset management workflows.