Efficacy of StaMPS technique for monitoring surface deformation in L'Aquila, Italy

Abstract. This research work investigates the efficacy of the Stanford Method for Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (StaMPS) in measuring the surface deformation over the L'Aquila region, Italy just before an event of earthquake of magnitude M_w 6.3 by using seven descending Envisat C-Band ASAR images. The results show that the StaMPS technique successfully extracted sufficient number of Persistent Scatterers (PS) to derive a one dimensional (1D) time series displacement map which shows the deformation rates up to 59 mm/year in the satellite Line of Sight (LOS) direction and 50.8 mm/year in the direction opposite to the satellite LOS. Further, several deformation gradients are also observed from this map which indicate the occurrence of multiple crustal movement mechanism. Another dataset of 14 ASAR images is processed covering a time period before and after the earthquake in the study area to validate the results obtained by the previous dataset. We observed that the generated displacement map follows the deformation characteristics of the earlier displacement map in terms of magnitude and surface movement. We conclude that the generated displacement maps validate the presence of a normal fault mechanism with a tectonic process stretching in a NW-SE direction as predicted by earlier research studies.