EGU24-20708, updated on 11 Mar 2024
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-20708
EGU General Assembly 2024
© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

ADATools: free and user-friendly tools to semiautomatically extract and analyse wide PSI displacement maps. Applications to the European Ground Motion Service (EGMS). 

Anna Barra1, María Cuevas-González1, José Navarro1, Marta Béjar-Pizarro2, Pablo Ezquerro2, Silvia Bianchini3, Jose Luis Zezere4, Camilla Medici3, Matteo Del Soldato3, Riccardo Palamà1, Saeedeh Shahbazi1, Rosa María Mateos2, Eleftheria Poyiadji5, David Alfonso Jorde2, Michele Crosetto1, and Oriol Monserrat1
Anna Barra et al.
  • 1Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC/CERCA), Geomatics RU, Castelldefels, Spain (anna.barra@cttc.es)
  • 2Instituto Geológico y Minero de España (IGME-CSIC)
  • 3Università di Firenze (UNIFI)
  • 4Instituto de Geografia e Ordenamento do Território (IGOT), Universidade de Lisboa
  • 5Hellenic Survey of Geology and Mineral Exploration (H.S.G.M.E.)

The availability of displacement maps across extensive regions, based on Multi-Temporal SAR satellite interferometry techniques (MT-InSAR), has notably increased in recent years. The launch of the Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellites in 2014, ensuring global and regular acquisitions under an open and free data distribution policy, marked a turning point in both exploitation and application. A significant outcome of this progress is the development of regional, national, and continental ground motion services, providing comprehensive displacement maps that offer highly detailed information regarding both human activities and natural phenomena. Since 2022, the European Ground Motion Service (EGMS) freely provides billions of displacement Measurements Points (MP) updated annually, covering nearly the entire European territory, characterized by high reliability and millimetric precision. Despite the full potential usefulness of these maps for territorial management and risk assessment, these data remain still underexploited. With the aim of improving the operational use of this extensive catalogue, there is a critical need for automated tools that can simplify and accelerate the extraction, analysis, and interpretation processes. The production of derived and simplified maps is crucial for the uptake of the EGMS products by both expert and non-expert InSAR users. In response to this need, projects such as the European RASTOOL (DG-HECHO, UCPM-PJG-101048474) and the Spanish SARAI (MCIN/AEI) have made concerted efforts to explore both artificial intelligence and deterministic approaches. In this context, we present the deterministic methodologies and the developed tools, called ADATools (i.e., Active Deformation Areas Tools). Designed to be flexible, adaptable, and user-friendly, these tools aim to support territorial and risk management, with specific attention given to compatibility with EGMS data formats. The first tool, ADAFinder, is an improvement of a previously consolidated tool developed in the frame of previous European projects. ADAFinder allows the automatic extraction and selection of most significant ADAs, a crucial initial step in transitioning from a multitude of individual MPs to a manageable number of polygons to be further analysed or used. Following the identification of moving areas or ADAs, the ADAClassifier permits a preliminary evaluation of the processes likely causing the displacement. Incorporating auxiliary data, each ADA receives a preliminary characterization, allowing to visualize associations with landslides, subsidence, sinkhole, construction settlements, or uplift. Furthermore, a temporal characterization based on the automatic analysis of the time series from all MPs within each ADA is provided. Both temporal and phenomena characterizations are then used for an initial ranking of ADAs, considering their potential impact on structures and infrastructures, using the ADAImpact. In this presentation, examples of results obtained by applying the ADATools to the EGMS data will be presented, emphasizing strengths, and outlining perspectives for future improvements. This work is part of the Spanish Grant SARAI, PID2020-116540RB-C21, funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033.

How to cite: Barra, A., Cuevas-González, M., Navarro, J., Béjar-Pizarro, M., Ezquerro, P., Bianchini, S., Zezere, J. L., Medici, C., Del Soldato, M., Palamà, R., Shahbazi, S., Mateos, R. M., Poyiadji, E., Alfonso Jorde, D., Crosetto, M., and Monserrat, O.: ADATools: free and user-friendly tools to semiautomatically extract and analyse wide PSI displacement maps. Applications to the European Ground Motion Service (EGMS). , EGU General Assembly 2024, Vienna, Austria, 14–19 Apr 2024, EGU24-20708, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-20708, 2024.