The use of MT-DInSAR data for the safety assessment and monitoring of structures and infrastructures: the case study of “Torri Stellari” in Rome

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) field gained increasing interest during the last years, also due to the huge amount of civil structures and infrastructures near or beyond their design life, and needs to be managed, particularly in a multi-hazard prone area like Italy. In this context, the advanced multi-temporal differential interferometry synthetic aperture radar (MT-DInSAR) techniques represent a great potential for the SHM applications and future development. The exploitation of such techniques in the monitoring and structural assessment of the built environment is still an open issue even if some first applications are available in literature showing promising potentialities. In this work, after a brief description of the general framework for structural monitoring and assessment, previously proposed by the authors, the case study of the Torri Stellari buildings in Rome (Italy) is presented and critically discussed. In particular, starting from COSMO-SkyMed (CSK) ascending and descending SAR datasets and applying the Small BAseline Subset (SBAS) DInSAR processing technique, the measurement points of the investigated area are obtained for both acquisition geometries. Different techniques are applied to both the displacement time series and mean deformation velocity for assessing the structural behavior or monitoring of constructions.