scholarly journals APPLICATIONS OF MEDIUM C-BAND AND HIGH RESOLUTION X-BAND MULTITEMPORAL INTERFEROMETRY IN LANDSLIDE INVESTIGATIONS

Author(s):  
J. Wasowski ◽  
F. Bovenga ◽  
R. Nutricato ◽  
D. O. Nitti ◽  
M. T. Chiaradia

With the increasing quantity and quality of the imagery available from a growing number of SAR satellites and the improved processing algorithms, multi-temporal interferometry (MTI) is expected to be commonly applied in landslide studies. MTI can now provide long-term (years), regular (weekly-monthly), precise (mm) measurements of ground displacements over large areas (thousands of km2), at medium (~20 m) to high (up to 1-3 m) spatial resolutions, combined with the possibility of multi-scale (regional to local) investigations, using the same series of radar images. We focus on the benefits as well as challenges of multisensor and multi-scale investigations by discussing MTI results regarding two landslide prone regions with distinctly different topographic, climatic and vegetation conditions (mountains in Central Albania and Southern Gansu, China), for which C-band (ERS or ENVISAT) and X-band COSMO-SkyMed (CSK) imagery was available (all in Stripmap descending mode). In both cases X-band MTI outperformed C-band MTI by providing more valuable information for the regional to local scale detection of slope deformations and landslide hazard assessment. This is related to the better spatial-temporal resolutions and more suitable incidence angles (40°-30° versus 23°) of CSK data While the use of medium resolution imagery may be appropriate and more cost-effective in reconnaissance or regional scale investigations, high resolution data could be preferentially exploited when focusing on urbanized landslides or potentially unstable slopes in urban/peri-urban areas, and slopes traversed by lifelines and other engineering structures.

1989 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 99 ◽  
Author(s):  
S.S. Webster ◽  
R.W. Henley

High resolution airborne geophysical data over broad areas have been found to optimize exploration for epithermal gold deposits in differing geological environments.Genetic exploration models may be tested in favourable sites by the recognition of geophysical signatures. These signatures reflect structural, lithological and alteration patterns arising from controls on ore deposits and can be applied at regional or detailed scales, using the same data set.At regional scale (e.g. 1:100,000) the magnetic data reflect the regional tectonics and divide the area into domains for the application of appropriate genetic models. At prospect scale (e.g. 1:25,000) the radiometric data allow the extrapolation of poorly outcropping geology to provide a cost-effective mapping technique. The magnetic data can be used to supplement this interpretation or can be used to target deeper sources for direct investigation by drilling.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eoghan Keany ◽  
Geoffrey Bessardon ◽  
Emily Gleeson

<p>To represent surface thermal, turbulent and humidity exchanges, Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) systems require a land-cover classification map to calculate sur-face parameters used in surface flux estimation. The latest land-cover classification map used in the HARMONIE-AROME configuration of the shared ALADIN-HIRLAMNWP system for operational weather forecasting is ECOCLIMAP-SG (ECO-SG). The first evaluation of ECO-SG over Ireland suggested that sparse urban areas are underestimated and instead appear as vegetation areas (1). While the work of (2) on land-cover classification helps to correct the horizontal extent of urban areas, the method does not provide information on the vertical characteristics of urban areas. ECO-SG urban classification implicitly includes building heights (3), and any improvement to ECO-SG urban area extent requires a complementary building height dataset.</p><p>Openly accessible building height data at a national scale does not exist for the island of Ireland. This work seeks to address this gap in availability by extrapolating the preexisting localised building height data across the entire island. The study utilises information from both the temporal and spatial dimensions by creating band-wise temporal aggregation statistics from morphological operations, for both the Sentinel-1A/B and Sentinel-2A/B constellations (4). The extrapolation uses building height information from the Copernicus Urban Atlas, which contains regional coverage for Dublin at 10 m x10 m resolution (5). Various regression models were then trained on these aggregated statistics to make pixel-wise building height estimates. These model estimates were then evaluated with an adjusted RMSE metric, with the most accurate model chosen to map the entire country. This method relies solely on freely available satellite imagery and open-source software, providing a cost-effective mapping service at a national scale that can be updated more frequently, unlike expensive once-off private mapping services. Furthermore, this process could be applied by these services to reduce costs by taking a small representative sample and extrapolating the rest of the area. This method can be applied beyond national borders providing a uniform map that does not depends on the different private service practices facilitating the updates of global or continental land-cover information used in NWP.</p><p> </p><p>(1) G. Bessardon and E. Gleeson, “Using the best available physiography to improve weather forecasts for Ireland,” in Challenges in High-Resolution Short Range NWP at European level including forecaster-developer cooperation, European Meteorological Society, 2019.</p><p>(2) E. Walsh, et al., “Using machine learning to produce a very high-resolution land-cover map for Ireland, ” Advances in Science and Research,  (accepted for publication).</p><p>(3) CNRM, "Wiki - ECOCLIMAP-SG" https://opensource.umr-cnrm.fr/projects/ecoclimap-sg/wiki</p><p>(4) D. Frantz, et al., “National-scale mapping of building height using sentinel-1 and sentinel-2 time series,” Remote Sensing of Environment, vol. 252, 2021.</p><p>(5) M. Fitrzyk, et al., “Esa Copernicus sentinel-1 exploitation activities,” in IGARSS 2019-2019 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, IEEE, 2019.</p>


Water ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 1369
Author(s):  
Ling Jiang ◽  
Yang Hu ◽  
Xilin Xia ◽  
Qiuhua Liang ◽  
Andrea Soltoggio ◽  
...  

The scarcity of high-resolution urban digital elevation model (DEM) datasets, particularly in certain developing countries, has posed a challenge for many water-related applications such as flood risk management. A solution to address this is to develop effective approaches to reconstruct high-resolution DEMs from their low-resolution equivalents that are more widely available. However, the current high-resolution DEM reconstruction approaches mainly focus on natural topography. Few attempts have been made for urban topography, which is typically an integration of complex artificial and natural features. This study proposed a novel multi-scale mapping approach based on convolutional neural network (CNN) to deal with the complex features of urban topography and to reconstruct high-resolution urban DEMs. The proposed multi-scale CNN model was firstly trained using urban DEMs that contained topographic features at different resolutions, and then used to reconstruct the urban DEM at a specified (high) resolution from a low-resolution equivalent. A two-level accuracy assessment approach was also designed to evaluate the performance of the proposed urban DEM reconstruction method, in terms of numerical accuracy and morphological accuracy. The proposed DEM reconstruction approach was applied to a 121 km2 urbanized area in London, United Kingdom. Compared with other commonly used methods, the current CNN-based approach produced superior results, providing a cost-effective innovative method to acquire high-resolution DEMs in other data-scarce regions.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sigrid Roessner ◽  
Robert Behling ◽  
Mahdi Motagh ◽  
Hans Ulrich-wetzel

<p>Landslides represent a worldwide natural hazard and often occur as cascading effects related to triggering events, such as earthquakes and hydrometeorological extremes. Recent examples are the Kaikoura earthquake in New Zealand (November 2016), the Gorkha earthquake in Nepal (April/May 2015), and the Typhoon Morakot in Taiwan (August 2009) as well as less intense rainfall events persisting over unusually long periods of time as observed for Central Asia (spring 2017) and Iran (spring 2019). Each of these events has caused thousands of landslides that account substantially to the primary disaster’s impact. Moreover, their initial failure usually represents the onset of long-term progressing slope destabilization leading to multiple reactivations and thus to long-term increased hazard and risk. Therefore, regular systematic high-resolution monitoring of landslide prone regions is of key importance for characterization, understanding and modelling of spatiotemporal landslide evolution in the context of different triggering and predisposing settings. Because of the large extent of the affected areas of up to several ten thousands km<sup>2</sup>, the use of multi-temporal and multi-scale remote sensing methods is of key importance for large area process analysis. In this context, new opportunities have opened up with the increasing availability of satellite remote sensing data of suitable spatial and temporal resolution (Sentinels, Planet) as well as the advances in UAV based very high resolution monitoring and mapping.</p><p>During the last decade, we have been pursuing extensive methodological developments in remote sensing based time series analysis including optical and radar observations with the goal of performing large area and at the same time detailed spatiotemporal analysis of landslide prone regions. These developments include automated post-failure landslide detection and mapping as well as assessment of the kinematics of pre- and post-failure slope evolution.  Our combined optical and radar remote sensing approaches aim at an improved understanding of spatiotemporal dynamics and complexities related to evolution of landslide prone slopes at different spatial and temporal scales.  In this context, we additionally integrate UAV-based observation for deriving volumetric changes also related to globally available DEM products, such as SRTM and ALOS.  </p><p>We present results for selected settings comprising large area co-seismic landslide occurrence related to the Kaikoura 2016 and the Nepal 2015 earthquakes. For the latter one we also analyzed annual pre- and post-seismic monsoon related landslide activity contributing to a better understanding of the interplay between these main triggering factors. Moreover, we report on ten years of large area systematic landslide monitoring in Southern Kyrgyzstan resulting in a multi-temporal regional landslide inventory of so far unprecedented spatiotemporal detail and completeness forming the basis for further analysis of the obtained landslide concentration patterns. We also present first results of our analysis of landslides triggered by intense rainfall and flood events in spring of 2019 in the North of Iran. We conclude that in all cases, the obtained results are crucial for improved landslide prediction and reduction of future landslide impact. Thus, our methodological developments represent an important contribution towards improved hazard and risk assessment as well as rapid mapping and early warning</p>


Author(s):  
L. Pádua ◽  
T. Adão ◽  
N. Guimarães ◽  
A. Sousa ◽  
E. Peres ◽  
...  

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> In recent years unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been used in several applications and research studies related to environmental monitoring. The works performed have demonstrated the suitability of UAVs to be employed in different scenarios, taking advantage of its capacity to acquire high-resolution data from different sensing payloads, in a timely and flexible manner. In forestry ecosystems, UAVs can be used with accuracies comparable with traditional methods to retrieve different forest properties, to monitor forest disturbances and to support disaster monitoring in fire and post-fire scenarios. In this study an area recently affected by a wildfire was surveyed using two UAVs to acquire multi-spectral data and RGB imagery at different resolutions. By analysing the surveyed area, it was possible to detect trees, that were able to survive to the fire. By comparing the ground-truth data and the measurements estimated from the UAV-imagery, it was found a positive correlation between burned height and a high correlation for tree height. The mean NDVI value was extracted used to create a three classes map. Higher NDVI values were mostly located in trees that survived that were not/barely affected by the fire. The results achieved by this study reiterate the effectiveness of UAVs to be used as a timely, efficient and cost-effective data acquisition tool, helping for forestry management planning and for monitoring forest rehabilitation in post-fire scenarios.</p>


2019 ◽  
pp. 159-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guglielmina Adele Diolaiuti ◽  
Roberto Sergio Azzoni ◽  
Carlo D'Agata ◽  
Davide Maragno ◽  
Davide Fugazza ◽  
...  

Remote sensing investigations permit to map and describe at a regional scale and with a multi-temporal approach mountain glaciers. In this work, we present some results from the New Italian Glacier Inventory which we developed by analyzing high-resolution color orthophotos acquired in the timeframe 2005–2011. In particular, in this paper we focused on each Italian Alpine Region, describing in detail glacier extent and features of each mountain group. Although Italian glaciologists were the first to produce glacier inventories (developing a glacier database as early as the beginning of the 20th century), during the last three decades only regional and local glacier lists have been developed. Therefore, a comprehensive study describing the actual whole Italian glaciation has been lacking. The New Italian Glacier Inventory describes 903 glaciers covering altogether an area of 368.10 km2 ± 2%. We found that about 84% of the total number of ice bodies is composed of glaciers smaller than 0.5 km2 covering only 21% of the total area, indicating that the Italian glacier resource is spread into several small ice bodies with only few larger glaciers. A comparison between the total glacier area of the new inventory and the glacier coverage value from the CGI Inventory (1959–1962) suggests a reduction of the glacier extent of about 30%.


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