As the soil thaws in summer, the land subsides, owing to the greater volume of ice than of water. This deformation helps monitor water storage because the subsidence magnitude is proportional to water volume. In this study, the  interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) technique was used to map subsidence around Toolik Lake, Arctic Alaska. Both InSAR and field observations suggest that soil water storage ranges from 0 to 75 cm, with small errors, and that the spatial distribution of soil water correlates strongly with topography and vegetation.