Remote monitoring of the Comba Citrin landslide using discontinuous GBInSAR campaigns

Abstract

This paper describes the use of the discontinuous Ground-Based Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar technique (GBInSAR) to monitor the displacement of the Comba Citrin landslide in the North Western Italian Alps. Two GBInSAR surveys were carried out respectively during the summer and the fall of 2015 separated by a temporal baseline of 63days. For each GBInSAR survey, which lasted respectively 166.2h (6 dd, 22h, 12′) and 238.3h (9 dd, 22h, 18′), two sets of 139 and 275 SAR images were acquired. After the selection of a specific stack of Persistent Scatterers, the SAR images of each survey were analyzed separately and in combination with the images of the other survey to detect the possible displacements occurred both in every single survey as well as in the elapsed time between the two different campaigns. The displacement maps showed that two different sectors of the monitored slope were affected by millimetres to centimetres movements during the monitoring period. The results obtained for the Comba Citrin landslide show that the discontinuous GBInSAR can be reliably adopted to monitor the displacement of landslides moving at an average rate of few centimetres per year.