A priori estimation of radar satellite interferometry’s sensitivity for landslide monitoring in the Italian Emilia-Romagna region

The InSAR technique is known to be a powerful tool for precise monitoring of wide areas in terms of displacements. It is conceivable to also use this technique to monitor landslide areas, but geometrical distortions due to ground morphology and land cover could make InSAR processing ineffective for such applications. Because of the computational burden of InSAR processing, it is important to have preliminary knowledge about the possible suitability of the technique for the inspected area before acquiring and processing the data. This paper aims to perform a preliminary analysis of the InSAR sensitivity for the specific case of landslide monitoring. A new approach is proposed considering aspects specific to landslide displacements, which are basically tangent to the slope direction. Pre-processed coherence maps were used to account for the impact of land cover. The whole analysis can be carried out without acquiring cumbersome SAR datasets and can be used as a preliminary step. The Italian Emilia-Romagna region has been considered as the study area, with landslide areas accounting for more than 12% of its territory. The outcomes show that the inspected area has favourable morphological conditions, mainly thanks to its mild slopes and the limited number of landslides facing north, but the land cover has a strong negative impact on the InSAR sensitivity. Nevertheless, 7.5% of the landslide areas have promising conditions for monitoring using radar interferometry.