ADAfinder Tool Applied to EGMS Data for the Structural Health Monitoring of Urban Settlements

The new European Ground Motion Service (EGMS) opens a new prospect in the study of the ground deformation phenomena influencing structures and infrastructures, at regional scale, exploiting the huge archives of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images acquired from Sentinel-1 satellites. The research is currently oriented toward developing new methodologies to exploit this great volume of data, the management of which is difficult and onerous in terms of time. A new methodology for the monitoring of the deformations of urban settlements, based on the application of the ADAfinder tool to EGMS measure points, is proposed in this work. It targets the semi-automatic extraction of active deformation areas (ADA), given in the form of maps, with the goal to identify the buildings affected by displacements above a given threshold among all the buildings included in the investigated area. This allows a smart selection of the buildings needing insights about their condition through on-site monitoring or inspections, providing real support for the management of the urban areas. The proposed methodology is applied to two different case study areas in the city of Barcelona (Spain): the Eixample, in the heart of the city, and the Zona Franca, an industrial area near to the harbor.