Earthquake rapid mapping by satellite remote sensing data: L’Aquila April 6th, 2009 event

Destructive earthquakes challenge Earth Observation
(EO) systems to demonstrate their usefulness in supporting
intervention and relief actions. The use of EO data in a disaster
context has been widely investigated from a theoretical point
of view, but only recently the developed methods seem to have
reached near to the operational use. In this paper a case study on
the April 6th, 2009 earthquake (M=6.3) event, which stroke
L’Aquila, Italy, is presented and commented. Although damage to
the city was not extremely extensive, the case is interesting because
it was handled by the authors in a real-time, emergency context.
A new data fusion approach, between SAR and optical data, has
been proposed. It shows that optical data are more suitable to
distinguish between damage and non-damage classes, while SAR
textures features allow to better distinguishing different classes of
damages at block scale such as low and heavy damage.