Results - Short description and deliverables

SHORT DESCRIPTION AND DELIVERABLES

The aim of the project is to develop a procedure to evaluate and periodically update, at a regional scale, the activity state of a geohazards and the potential impact on urban areas, by using Sentinel-1 data. The final products of the project are addressed to support the Civil Protection Authorities (CPA) in the geohazard management. The products must be readable and reliable to be easily exploited by the CPA in their prevention activities.

The main input to periodically generate regional deformation activity maps are Sentinel- 1 data: the wide coverage of the images permits a regional scale monitoring, Sentinel-1 it ensure a regular worldwide acquisition, with an high temporal sempling (6-12 days) and it is completely free, allowing to make long term monitoring planning. Moreover, if compared with other c band satellite data (i.e. ERS and ENVISAT) Sentinel-1 reduce both the temporal and the geometric decorrelations.

Here the main achieved results are listed. For each task of the project is reported a short description and the delivered technical reports (click on the links to read the .pdf files).

Task B: user requirements and assessments

Action B.1 Identification of user needs

To define the needs, the results of two activities are taken as input: 1) the review of international and EU strategies and Directives as well as the results of previous projects on the landslides, subsidence and geohazard risks management; 2) the analysis of the existing natural risks prevention procedures of the CPAs involved in the project (Italian Civil Protection Department – IDCP and Canarias Civil Protection - CDCP), with a specific focus on the hydraulic and geological risk management, for Italian civil protection, and including also the volcanic risk management for the Canarias authority.The preliminary identification of two qualitative lists of user needs, based on each operative workflow of the two CPAs involved, has been done. These two separated lists have been re-worked taking into account the international and EU strategies and Directives and the results of previous main developed EU projects. The results is the final list of user requirements, not specific only for Spanish or Italian framework, but useful to support Civil protection authorities in increasing knowledge and ability to manage and reduce the geological risks. Due to the fact that the user requirements are defined in the first stage of the project, this list, which plays the role of starting point and guidance for the development of the products, will be updated during the progresses of the project. This is because some useful input could derive from the close collaboration among users, scientists and technological partners during the next phase of the project.

Action B.2 User Assessment

The objective of this action is the devolvement of an assessment procedure to evaluate the progresses of the project. In particular, this procedure will be applied during the second year of the project to assess the products delivered according to the user requirements defined in the Deliverable DB.1, which are listed in the annex A, in their consolidated version.

The procedure to assess the progresses and the results of the Safety project is the Gap analysis. The Gap analysis will be applied to the list of user requirements established for each product in order to identify existing gaps between requirements and products and identify, if needed, recovery actions to fill the gaps.

As reported in the deliverable DB.1, due to the fact that the user requirements have been defined in the first stage of the project, the list, which plays the role of guidance for the development of the products, has been reviewed to be updated with the progresses of the project accomplished during the first year. The details of the products has been discussed and clarified among the consortium and some useful inputs are derived from the partners collaboration. The list of final user requirements of the Safety project are reported in the Annex A.

Task C: Sentinel-1 software development and data processing

Action C.2 Periodically updated regional ground deformation activity maps:

Canary Islands V₀, Volterra V₀, Canary Islands V₁, Volterra V₁, Canary Islands V₂, Volterra V₂

The main input of all the procedure in derived by the Sentinel-1 processing, which allow the periodical update of all the products of the procedure. Sometimes the interpretation of the DInSAR derived product (like the velocity map) can be complex, mostly for a final user who do not usually works with radar. The methodology has three phases, the interferograms generation, the activity map generation, in terms of velocity and accumulated deformation (deformation time-series), and the HotSpot, i.e. Active Deformation Areas (ADA), map generation. The last one is the final product, derived from the original activity map by analyzing the data in a Geographic Information System (GIS) environment, which isolate only the more reliable deformation areas over the noise. This product can be more easily read by the authorities, i.e. can be better exploited to integrate other information and analysis. The HotSpot Map, which is now called ADA map, is the input of the Task 3, to generate the Geohazard Activity Map and the Vulnerable Element Activity Map (VEAM). The first iteration (V0) of the processing has been considered not valid because of the short period of data. See also Barra et al., 2017 and Solari et al.,2017.

Task D: Test site characterizationand geodatabases

Action D.1 Test site characterization

The test-sites are the Volterra Municipality in Italy, and the Canary Islands in Spain. Only 3 of the Canary Islands have been studied, covering a land area of around 5000 km². Volterra Municipality is located in the Tuscany region and is around 250 km². The two test-sites are very different allowing to test the methodology on a wide scenario of applications and circumstances. The differences are resumed in the figure below. First of all the main geohazards are volcanic and rock-fall in the Canaries and landslides in Volterra. Than both the different lithologies and main land coverage determine a very different radar response in terms of coherence.

Action D.2 Geodatabase generation

This deliverable provides the description of the developed geodatabase and of its elements, giving a brief characterization of the different levels that constitute the geodatabase

Task E: Geohazard impact assessment

 Action E1 Tailoring of the existing knowledge and tools for the SAFETY purposes

The  main  goal  of  action  E.1  is  to  exploit  the  existing knowledge  and  tools  developed  within  projects  completed  in  the  framework  of  different European Funding programs (e.g. LAMPRE, DORIS). Particular attention will be paid to: i) the software  for  regional  landslide  susceptibility  modelling that  exploits  statistical  methods  for  the susceptibility  zonation,  and  ii)  the  software  for  the  determination  of  landslide  statistics  from inventory  maps  that  consists  of  algorithm  for  the  determination  of  statistics  of  landslide  size (area) derived from inventory maps. The deliverable describe the existing knowledge and tools, and the strategies used to adapt them to the SAFETY project.

Action E2 Susceptibility and hazard maps: E2.1 Susceptibility Volterra V₀, E2.2 Susceptibility Volterra V₁, E2.3 Susceptibility Canary V₀, E2.4 Susceptibility Canary V₁

The Action E.2 “Susceptibility and hazard maps” focuses on generating susceptibility and hazard maps using data available in the project test sites (Task D).
For the Volterra Municipality (E2.1 and E2.2) there is no information on temporal occurrence of landslides, in other word a multi-temporal landslide inventory map is not available. For this reason, the hazard map cannot be prepared and delivered. Single component of the hazard will be prepared not considering the temporal occurrence of slope failures. In particular, at this stage we have analysed and described: i) the statistical distribution of landslide size obtained using LAND-STAT, the software for the determination of landslide statistics from inventory maps; and ii) a set of different landslide susceptibility maps prepared using slope units and available thematic information (Alvioli et al., 2016).
In the Canary Islands test site, the rockfall spatial probability of occurrence has been estimated along the GC-200 road (E2.3 and E2.4). The developed methodology is based on rockfall simulations, and involves three main phases: (1) inventory, (2) simulation, and (3) validation. In order to generate a rockfall hazard map, STONE has been exploited, a GIS based rockfall simulation software which computes 2D and 3D rockfall trajectories starting from the identification of the sources areas, the digital terrain model (DTM) and the maps of the dynamic rolling friction coefficient and of the normal and tangential energy restitution coefficients. The appropriate identification and definition of these parameters determines the accuracy of the simulation. A method to calibrate and validate the STONE rockfall modelling software in a volcanic context has been developed for the first time, to provide to Civil Protection a reliable tool to assess hazard and risk posed by rockfall at regional scale, which could be applied later in any island of the archipelago.

Action E3 Generation of geohazard activity maps: E3.2 Geohazard Activity Maps V0, E3.3-E3.4 Geohazard Activity Maps V1

The action E3 aims at developing and testing a methodology capable of generating and periodical updating geohazard activity maps. These maps derive from the intersection between the detect active and significant ground deformation areas (Task C) and existing geohazard information (e.g. inventories, susceptibility map, hazard map) or local information (e.g. geological, topographic, ground truth, field surveys). This permits on one hand to validate and/or update the existing geohazard information, on the other hand to validate the detected areas and to attribute to each area their plausible cause.

Action E4 Impact assessment on structures and infrastructures:

E4 Impact assessment on structures and infrastructures, E4.3 Impact assessment of Volterra test site (V1), E4.4 Impact assessmentof the Canary Islands test site (V1), E4.5 Impact assessment of Volterra test site (V2), E4.6 Impact assessmentof the Canary Islands test site (V2)

The Impact Assessment Maps are one of the four deliverables foreseen in Task E “Geohazard impact assessment”. This Task aims at assessing the impact of detected and/or assessed geohazards on road networks and built-up areas. The final goal is to provide an operable methodology, a protocol, which can be integrated into the Civil Protection prevention activities. The methodology aims at intersecting the Hot Spots (HS) database, generated in the action E.3 – “Geohazard activity maps”, with a classified element at risk catalogue for each test site. The proposed classification is based on a qualitative system called “Strategic Vulnerability (SV)” that consider the potential damages of a certain structure that is already used, could be used or plays a crucial role in the risk management chain of an area or of a municipality. This system is particularly designed for Civil Protection Authorities (CPA). The final output is the Vulnerable Element Activity Map (VEAM), that consists in a simplified colour scale map that includes the information of both the HSs, derived from the InSAR (Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar) analysis, and the SV of the elements at risk. In this way, each area affected by active deformations has been identified and included in a geodatabase containing attribute information about: the location of the HS, the geological context, the SV value of the element at risk and its description, the type of movement affecting the HS (landslide/creep or subsidence) and the LOS (Line of Sight) mean velocity value of the HS. 

Task F: Product validation

Action F1 Definition of the validation procedures, Action F2 Report on the validation results

The Action F.1 consists on the Definition of the validation procedures, that is the general criteria and the procedures adopted to validate SAFETY products. They will be decided based on the inputs from task D.B1 “User Requirements and Assessments”, updated on 31st May 2016. The deliverable D.F1 describes the specific validation procedures to be executed in both the selected test sites: the Volterra area (Italy) and the Canary Islands (Spain).

The validation of the SAFETY products will be based on three pillars:
 (1) To critically assess the software developed tools.
 (2) To validate the results obtained on the two test sites of the project;
 (3) To evaluate the usefulness of integrating SAFETY products into CPA prevention activities.
This will provide a fundamental contribution to prove the technical soundness of the proposed products and thus increase their acceptability. The technical acceptability of innovative products, like  those  proposed  in  this  project,  is  an  essential  component  to  guarantee  an  effective implementation of the SAFETY procedures in the workflows of the CPAs.

In the figures below two examples of validation of the InSAR derived displacement time series with the GNSS data.

Task G: Project sustainability 

Action G1 Description of the functionality of the long-term operative infrastructure

This task is aimed at providing the SAFETY project with a long term infrastructure designed to allow the continuation of the project activities, at least on the two test sites of the project. Activities based on the SAFETY methodology will be integrated as a service supporting geohazards monitoring activities of different public institutions supporting the CPAs.

- SAFETY in the IGN Volcano Monitoring System (VMS)

The SAFETY tools (modified and automated according to the specific needs and requirements) are integrated into the VMS procedures to provide useful information to CP authorities. Products derived from InSAR processing reinforce deformation interpretation provided by VMS, strengthening their ability to create alarms.

- SAFETY in UNIFI "PS continuous streaming for landslide monitoring and mapping on Tuscany Region (Italy)"

UNIFI is carrying out an agreement named “PS continuous streaming for landslide monitoring and mapping on Tuscany Region (Italy)” with the Italian Civil Protection and the Regional Authority (Tuscany region). In this contest, UNIFI is applying the procedure developed in the SAFETY project. After this agreement, which is a pilot project, the SAFETY procedure would be potentially implemented for Civil Protection agency and Local authorities in charge of environmental management. 

- SAFETY for Spanish Geological Survey and the Canary Island Civil Protection

An operable methodology (i.e. a protocol) to be integrated into Civil Protection activities of prevention providing the capability of evaluating and assessing rockfall hazard has been implemented in SAFETY. In case of future event a new data form designed in the frame of SAFETY project will be used by CPA to collect future rockfall events data.