VENEZIA SUBSIDENCE MONITORING SERVICE IN THE LAGOON OF VENICE FOR REGIONAL ADMINISTRATIVE AND WATER AUTHORITIES DATA USER PROGRAMME (DUP), II PERIOD Executive Summary

Abstract

The scope of the project “VENEZIA - Subsidence monitoring service in the Lagoon of Venice for regional administrative and water authorities” was to define and implement a land subsidence monitoring service in the Lagoon of Venice for regional and administrative authorities. In order to provide the best knowledge of the land subsidence process around the Lagoon of Venice, SAR-based monitoring techniques (differential SAR interferometry and interferometric point target analysis) were integrated with levelling and GPS surveys into an overall information system.

Land subsidence due to natural and anthropogenic causes has represented one of the most serious environmental problems for the Lagoon of Venice and its catchment (Tosi et al., 2002, Carbognin and Tosi, 2003, Carbognin et al., in press). Land subsidence has increased the vulnerability and the geological hazard (i.e. river flooding, riverbank stability, intrusion of seawater in the aquifer system, deteriorating of the littoral sectors with a general coastline regression and an increment of the sea bottom slope close to the shoreline) of these areas, a large portion of which lies below the mean sea level. After the regulation of groundwater exploitation from the Venetian aquifer-aquitard system, a remarkable slowing down of the induced subsidence in Marghera (industrial zone), in the historical center of Venice and along the littorals was ascertained in the 1970’s. Recent studies (Carbognin and Tosi, 2003) have shown that land subsidence is still in progress in the southern and northern coastal areas and in the nearby mainland, where groundwater is extracted from artesian wells, thicker and more compressible Holocene sediments are present, and organic soil oxidation takes place in reclaimed areas.

Until 1999, levelling of the Venice region was carried out only along the coast and the lagoon edges and the monitoring network was composed by benchmarks along single levelling lines; a fine grid network was established only in the city of Venice. In recent years, the levelling network has been updated to cover all the southern part of the Lagoon, and plans exist to cover also the northern sector. The same network used for the levelling surveys is also considered for differential GPS measurements. In addition to these ground-based methods, differential SAR interferometry using long series of SAR data (Wegmüller and Strozzi, 1998; Strozzi et al, 2001) and interferometric point target analysis (IPTA) (Wegmüller et al., 2003, Werner et al., 2003) have emerged as very promising tools for the monitoring of land subsidence at high spatial resolution.

The VENEZIA project was organized along a service definition phase, a service implementation phase and a service quality assessment phase. Important elements of the project were the definition, implementation and validation of the service for interferometric point target analysis and the integration of the SAR-based monitoring techniques with levelling and GPS surveys into an overall information system capable to provide the best knowledge of the subsidence process to the authorities that manage the Po Plain area around the Lagoon of Venice.