A new monitoring strategy to control land movements. The Veneto Region test area
L. Carbognin, F. Rizzetto, L. Tosi
Istituto per lo Studio della Dinamica delle Grandi Masse, CNR, Venezia,
Italy
T. Strozzi
Gamma Remote Sensing, Muri (BE), Switzerland
P. Teatini,
Dept. Mathematical Methods and Models for Scientific
Applications, University of Padova, Padova, Italy
A. Vitturi
Servizio Geologico - Provincia di Venezia, Mestre (VE), Italy
ABSTRACT
Anthropogenic land subsidence has widely been affecting the Veneto Region, northern
Italy, since the past century. Groundwater withdrawals for industrial, domestic, and
agricultural uses, exploitation of mineral water, thermal water for health treatment,
methane-bearing water, and peat oxidation in reclaimed farmlands produced a land
settlement varying in time and space throughout the area. Moreover, natural consolidation
of the Quaternary deposits and tectonics of the pre-Quaternary basement contribute to
increase ground surface lowering. Different survey techniques, with different
characteristics, have been adopted to control land subsidence. To overcome the limits
that characterize each single method and to enlarge the knowledge on regional land
subsidence, an integrated monitoring method has been designed to accurately and reliably
keep land movements under control in the study area. We combine five earth observation
techniques, i.e. spirit leveling, Continuous Global Positioning System (CGPS),
Differential GPS (DGPS), Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR), and
Interferometric Point Target Analysis (IPTA), together over about the last ten-years,
and homogenized and integrated their results in both the time and space domains. The
application of this Subsidence Integrated Monitoring System (SIMS) provides a new
complete and dependable picture of the vertical displacements in the Veneto Region
never available before.
