ARTEMIS – An operational tool to manage the information provided by Persistent Scatterers Monitoring at a regional scale.

The increasing diffusion of the PS (Persistent Scatterers) InSAR services across the world and the early adoption of PS-Monitoring techniques, provide to the civil protection authorities effective and objective tools for disaster risk prevention, empowering the capability to detect early-stage terrain deformations even in unpopulated areas.

More in detail, the PS Monitoring technique exploits the high temporal resolution provided by the recent satellite constellations (e.g. Sentinel 2), with revisitation times of about 14 days  detecting, at a regional scale, the so called “anomalies” (i.e.: the Persistent Scatterers which show acceleration trends compared to a given deformation trend). Considering that the deformation anomalies could be provoked by many factors not related to an incipient landslide, the so-called “false positives”, terrain investigations are usually required to assess a real landslide hazard .

Furthermore, to be effective, the terrain investigations aimed at validating a potential incipient landslide situation should be conducted within a short time, to allow an effective implementation of the safety measures by the civil protection authorities.

Many constraints such as the limited availability of human resources and terrain conditions usually hamper an extensive terrain validation of the anomalies provided by PS-InSAR monitoring services. It is thus necessary a fast and objective method to filter and prioritize the terrain deformation anomalies which have the highest probability to indicate an incipient landslide, and require an immediate terrain investigation.

To make that possible, we developed a semiautomated GIS-based information system, called ARTEMIS (Advanced Regional TErrain Motion Information System), which allows an objective and fast selection of the PS InSAR anomalies to be investigated, detected twice a month by the PS-Monitoring services.

The ARTEMIS is a multi-stage workflow operating a preliminary validation of the anomaly itself, followed by a danger assessment stage and a final risk-assessment stage. At the end of the process, a risk-rating score to prioritize the field investigation is provided. 

ARTEMIS is a flexible and scalable tool, which can be adapted to different geographical realities and PS-Monitoring services. Its workflow is openly available for non-commercial use.