Urban Settlements Monitoring Using Egms Data Through Adafinder Tool

Abstract

The Structural Health Monitoring of urban settlements can be pursued today exploiting satellite remote sensing Advanced Differential Synthetic Aperture Radar interferometry (A-DInSAR) techniques. At the European scale, the new European Ground Motion Service (EGMS) gives the deformative information obtained by the processing of the enormous archives of Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images in the period 2015-2020. In this work, a new procedure for valuable use of EGMS-derived data aimed at the monitoring of the deformations of urban areas is presented. The procedure includes the exploitation of a tool, called ADAfinder, which is able to extract active deformation areas (ADA) from datasets of measuring points, which means, it creates maps of areas affected by deformations above an estimated threshold. The aim of the procedure is the identification of buildings included in ADA, representing the buildings that require special attention, in terms of on-site monitoring or inspections. An application is presented, regarding a portion of the Zona Franca industrial area, in the city of Barcelona (Spain).