First Results from Spaceborne Radar Interferometry for the Study of Ground Displacements in Urban Areas

The Differential Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (DInSAR) is a remote sensing technique that allows us to produce spatially dense deformation maps with centimetre to millimetre accuracy and to detect and follow the temporal evolution of deformations via the generation of time – series. To do this, the information available from each interferometric data pair must be properly related to those included in the other acquisitions, via the generation of an appropriate sequence of DInSAR Interferograms. In this work we process a large set of data acquired by the European Remote Sensing (ERS) satellites on the Palau y Solitari de Plegamans area located near Barcelona (Spain) and on the Cagliari area (Italy). In the second work we apply an algorithm referred to as Small Baseline Subset (SBAS) proposed by I.R.E.A. - C.N.R. The results demonstrate that the DInSAR technique is a fast and precise method to detect and follow the temporal evolution of deformations, so it is a powerful technique for monitoring the territory and to reduce its vulnerability.