Abstract: The large-scale monitoring of tailings pond dam deformation is usually limited by low spatial and temporal
sampling rate,high cost and poor accuracy of hidden danger identification. Taking the concentrated areas of tailings ponds in
Anshan City,Liaoyang City and Benxi City in Liaoning Province as case study,a method is proposed for the long-term deformation monitoring and analyzing of tailings ponds in a wide region based on DS-InSAR technique,which is benefitted from advantages of distributed scatterers identification and improved maximum-likelihood-estimator of interferometric phase. The spatial and temporal distribution of the deformation on the tailings pond dams in the study area from January 2020 to October 2021 were obtained using 55 Sentinel-1A images. The result indicates that the DS-InSAR technique could effectively identify 25 out of 30 tailings pond dams in the study area,which is significantly higher than that of SBAS-InSAR technique. The maximum deformation rate on the tailings dams can reach -144 mm/ a. Additionally,there is a great acceleration in deformation rate of the dam surface after precipitation,which shows a significant correlation between them. Moreover,the number of reliable monitoring points of DS-InSAR is more than four times that of SBAS-InSAR,and there is a large consistency between the deformation rates respectively estimated from different techniques on the same points. Thus the proposed approach could provide data and technical support for both the general survey and stability analysis of tailings pond in large area.