Nation-wide mapping and classification of ground deformation phenomena through the spatial clustering of P-SBAS InSAR measurements: Italy case study

Abstract

The rising availability of satellite-based multi-temporal interferometric datasets covering large areas of the Earth surface constitutes a huge asset in the context of operational workflows aimed at improving land risk assessment and management. In order to cost-effectively handle huge amount of data, we design a semi-automatic procedure to quickly identify, map and inventory ground and infrastructures displacements by means of spatial clustering performed over very large-scale Differential Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (DInSAR) datasets. The detected deforming areas are then evaluated against the Line of Sight (LOS) velocity vector decomposition and the accessible ancillary layers for a preliminary classification of the triggering factors. We apply our methodology to the mean ascending and descending deformation maps covering the whole Italian territory resulting from 3294 and 2868 Sentinel-1 (S1) acquisitions respectively, spanning from March 2015 to December 2018 and processed through the Parallel Small BAseline Subset (P-SBAS) technique. By setting a displacement rate threshold of ± 1 cm/year, a total number of 14,638 areas resulting from both geometries are found to suffer from instability phenomena, the origin of which are in turn preliminary sorted in 11 classes split between natural causes and man-made activities. With 2 degrees of confidence, we classified landslide and subsidence events as the main causes of deformation within the Italian territory, constituting respectively 31% and 27% of the total unstable areas, followed by volcanic-related processes (22%). Lastly, we provide a complete overview of the deformation phenomena which have recently occurred on the Italian Peninsula starting from national scale statistical analysis and ending up with local scale investigations according to the deformation patterns visible through the vertical and East-West components of motion.