Use of Synthetic Aperture Radar Images for Crisis Response and Management

Remote sensing provides powerful instruments for the extraction of physical information whose knowledge can be used for supporting the crisis management activities. The use of this huge amount of information is still limited due to the lack of reliable interpretation models that allow to produce value added map of easy use in actual cases. The development of physical models along with the identification of the user needs allow to fill this gap. This paper is focused on the use of Synthetic Aperture Radar data, that provide a lot of information useful in many applications related to natural (volcanoes, earthquakes, floods, and so on) and human-driven (oil spills, Earth, air and sea pollution, and so on) disasters. The actual SAR technology allows a low cost use with significant performances in terms of spatial resolution, temporal revisit time and coverage. The proposed approach is supported by examples that show the potentialities of the use of SAR data for crisis prevention, management and response.