SAFETY project: Sentinel-1 based tools for geohazards monitoring and management

Abstract

SAFETY is a two-years European project started the 1st January 2016 and ended the 1st January 2018. The general aim of the project was to develop a methodology and tools in order to exploit Sentinel-1 data for detecting and monitoring the activity state of geohazards (e.g. landslides, volcanic and subsidence) and evaluating their impact on built-up areas and infrastructure networks, at a regional scale. The products of the methodology must support Civil Protection Authorities (CPA) in the risk management activities at a regional scale. In this contest, a strong effort has been spent to generate products that must be operative: reliable and easily to read by users who are not familiar with radar data. The developed procedure is fast, periodically repeatable, and case-adaptable. The methodology, allows the full exploitation of Sentinel-1 constellation data (wide area coverage, high temporal repeatability, freely available data) making feasible long term monitoring plannings. Moreover a free software tool for the Sentinel-1 SAR data processing has been developed. This work presents the developed methodology, through some images of the most significant results obtained over the two test sites of the project (the Canary Island, in Spain, and the Volterra municipality, in Italy), and explains both the strengths and the main lessons learnt for the future steps.