Understanding earthquakes: The key role of radar images

Abstract

The investigation of the fault rupture underlying earthquakes greatly improved thanks to the spread of radar images. Following pioneer applications in the eighties, Interferometry from Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) gained a prominent role in geodesy. Its capability to measure millimetric deformations for wide areas and the increased data availability from the early nineties, made InSAR a diffused and accepted analysis tool in tectonics, though several factors contribute to reduce the data quality. With the introduction of analytical or numerical modeling, InSAR maps are used to infer the source of an earthquake by means of data inversion. Newly developed algorithms, known as InSAR time-series, allowed to further improve the data accuracy and completeness, strengthening the InSAR contribution even in the study of the inter- and post-seismic phase. In this work we describe the rationale at the base of the whole processing, showing its application to the New Zealand 2010-2011 seismic sequence.