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In this article, we investigate the link between the closure phase and the observed systematic bias in deformation modeling with multilooked SAR interferometry. Multilooking or spatial averaging is commonly used to reduce stochastic noise over a neighborhood of distributed scatterers in interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) measurements. However, multilooking may break consistency among a triplet of interferometric phases formed from three acquisitions leading to a residual phase error called closure phase. Understanding the cause of closure phase in multilooked InSAR measurements and the impact of closure phase errors on the performance of InSAR time-series algorithms is crucial for quantifying the uncertainty of ground displacement time series derived from InSAR measurements. We develop a model that consistently explains both closure phase and systematic bias in multilooked …