Rapid assessment of landslide activity in Emilia Romagna using GB‐InSAR short surveys

Rapid assessment of landslide activity is important in case of adverse climatic conditions leading to civil protection’s alerts that require increased surveillance of risk areas. GB-InSAR is nowadays becoming a consolidated near-sensing monitoring technique for slope movements. It can be installed rapidly and it can rapidly provide results in the form of displacement maps. However, it has never been thoroughly tested in radar-hostile conditions such as these posed by large-scale earth slides – earth flows covered by a canopy of trees bushes and meadows, that are the typical landslides in Emilia Romagna Apennine. As sparse small villages, buildings, roads and other lifelines are often built on these landslide bodies, they are of particular concern for civil protection, especially during prolonged rainfall periods that determine attention/alerting conditions. To test the possibility to achieve improved surveillance capability in case of attention needed, a series of GB-InSAR spot campaigns lasting from a week to a month, was carried out in 2010-11 in several landslides of Emilia Romagna Apennine using a commercial interferometric radar. The aim was to evaluate the performance of the technique for rapid assessment of landslide activity, even in case of partly vegetated soil coverage conditions. The paper deals with the results obtained in 3 out of the 11 monitored sites.