ИСТИНА

The Big Sochi is a lovely resort on the Black Sea coast of the Greater Caucasus. It has always been a region of high landslide risk due to widely spread clays and marls saturated by water from abundant precipitations. Besides, it is a region of rather high seismicity. In recent years landslide monitoring and risk assessment have become vital due to strongly increasing anthropogenic impact. The Big Sochi area amounting to 3500 sq.km stretches along the Black Sea coast for about 150 km. Near the coast it is a highly populated area while in a few km from the beach there are only isolated villages in the mountains. A plenty of existing landslides are shallow, very slow (rates of movements up to several sm/Y) with maximum dimensions up to tens or a few hundred meters at the most. We have been studying aspects of InSAR application for landslides investigation on the Black Sea coast of the Northern Caucasus using satellite radar imagery with different wavelengths since 2011. Nowadays usage of S-1 images is of particular interest because of short time-interval between acquisitions (6-12 days) and free data access in almost real time of sensing via Internet.