A multiscale A-DInSAR approach for landslide hazard assessment

Extreme climate events have grown in frequency and severity in recent decades because of climate change and are expected to further intensify in the future. These events can modify the geomorphological features and land cover of a region, leading to a variation in the landslide hazard. For this reason, identifying, monitoring and updating the most influencing variables is essential for forecasting and mitigating the landslide impacts in vulnerable areas as well as for supporting decision-makers in land-use planning, and infrastructure development. To this end, this PhD project was focused on providing a comprehensive understanding of the slope instabilities in the Province of Belluno (Veneto Region, NE Italy) which was recently hit by two intense meteorological events. The main goals are (i) the investigation of the ground effects (in terms of slope instabilities and geomorphological variations) caused by the rainfall events for a landslide spatial distribution evaluation, (ii) quantifying the role of the conditioning factors in landslide hazard assessment, (iii) estimate the contribution of the Advanced Differential Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (A-DInSAR) technique. This Ph.D. thesis attempts to define the impact of various ancillary data and conditioning factors at different scales, and it shows the benefits of integrating interferometric data for landslide hazard assessment at the regional scale, as well as the possibility of further improving the interferometric analyses through customized processing for the investigation of single landslides.