Rapid Detection Of Debris Flows Using Synthetic Aperture Radar: A Coherence-Based Methodology

The ability to detect and map landslides triggered by intense rainfall in quasi-real time is essentialto mitigate their impact and for effective crisis management. The manipulation of space-bornesynthetic aperture radar (SAR) images has proven to be one of the most valuable and inalienableasset for this type of investigation. In mountainous areas, morphological variations, related tosurface processes and activated by forceful meteorological events, can be usually detected byapplying three type of approaches: amplitude-based methods, phase-coherence-based methodsand polarimetric techniques. This study present a rapid, effective and straightforward coherencebasedmethodology which, using just three SAR images, can detect the activation of debris flowswith a latency solely related to the repeat cycle of the SAR mission. The technique has been testedin the Italian Dolomites using the dataset of European Space Agency's mission Sentinel-1, showingpromising results. This research is carried out in the framework of Project VAILAND, a jointresearch agreement funded by the Veneto Region (Italy).