On August 24, 2016, a magnitude Mw 6.0 earthquake hit the Central Italy area.
The epicenter was located near the village of Accumoli, between Norcia and Amatrice.
This event was followed by two other earthquakes on October 26 and 30, with magnitudes of Mw 5.9 and Mw 6.5, respectively.
The latter is considered the strongest in Italy in the past 30 years.
Between 2016 and 2017 over 118,000 earthquakes have been recorded with a magnitude spanning between 3.0 and 3.9 Mw.
These events are caused by the slow deformation of the Apennines, with an extension of 2-4 mm/year perpendicular to the chain, generating normal earthquakes along west-dipping faults in this central-northern sector.
This earthquake caused 299 fatalities, while over 30,000 people have been displaced. Also, the infrastructures were severely impacted in a large area across several Italian regions. From 2016 to the end of 2023, the cost of these events are over 6.750 billion euros.
The GET-IT approach. The DTC will be demonstrated by using the following modules: INSAR, DAMSAT, DATAINT, GEOMOD. InSAR data from Sentinel-1 (ESA Copernicus) and ALOS (JAXA) will be jointly exploited with GNSS data to retrieve the seismic maps (along both the ascending and descending orbit) and the seismic sources. Moreover the damage will be estimated over the village of Amatrice which was almost destroyed by the earthquake, using change detectors extracted by satellite data both from optical and SAR sensors, collected by ESA Sentinel-2, Sentinel-1, ALOS-2 (JAXA), and COSMO-SkyMed (ASI) missions.
Expected Outcomes
Coseismic S1 ascending pair (left) and CSK descending pair (right) for the 24 August 2016 event
Slip distribution for the Mw 6.0, 24th Aug, 2016 (left) and for the Mw 5.9, 26th Oct, 2016 and Mw 6.5, 30rd Oct, 2016 events.
Damage map obtained through the integration of multi-spectral (Sentinel-2) and SAR (Cosmo-SkyMed) data. It provides 3 levels of damage for each of the buildings in the analysed scene.
References
Romaniello, V., Piscini, A., Bignami, C., Anniballe, R., Stramondo, S., 2016. A multisensor approach for the 2016 Amatrice earthquake damage assessment. Annals of Geophysics. https://doi.org/10.4401/ag-7185
Ferrentino, E., Nunziata, F., Bignami, C., Graziani, L., Maramai, A., Migliaccio, M., 2021. Multi-polarization C-band SAR imagery to quantify damage levels due to the Central Italy earthquake. International Journal of Remote Sensing 42, 5971–5986. https://doi.org/10.1080/01431161.2021.1933247