Earthquake Damages 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
_w
= 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.