Automated Radar Image of Deformation for Amatrice, Italy Earthquake

NASA and its partners are contributing observations and expertise to the ongoing response to the Aug. 23, 2016, magnitude 6.2 Amatrice earthquake in central Italy, which caused widespread building damage to several towns throughout the region. This earthquake was the strongest in that area since the 2009 earthquake that destroyed the city of L'Aquila.

The Advanced Rapid Imaging and Analysis (ARIA) data system, a collaborative project between NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, automatically generated interferometric synthetic aperture radar images from the Copernicus Sentinel 1A satellite operated by the European Space Agency (ESA) for the European Commission to calculate a map of the deformation of Earth's surface caused by the quake. This false-color map shows the amount of permanent surface movement, as viewed by the satellite, during a 12-day interval between two Sentinel 1 images acquired on Aug. 15, 2016, and Aug. 27, 2016. The movement was caused almost entirely by the earthquake.

In this map, the colors of the surface displacements are proportional to the surface motion. The red and pink tones show the areas where the land moved toward the satellite by up to 2 inches (5 centimeters). The area with various shades of blue moved away from the satellite, mostly downward, by as much as 8 inches (20 centimeters). Contours on the surface motion are 2 inches (5 centimeters) The green star shows the epicenter where the earthquake started as located by the U.S. Geological Survey National Earthquake Information Center. Black dots show town locations.

Scientists use these maps to build detailed models of the fault slip at depth and associated land movements to better understand the impact on future earthquake activity. The map shows the fault or faults that moved in the earthquake is about 14 miles (22 kilometers) long between Amatrice and Norcia and slopes to the west beneath the area that moved downward.

The KMZ file for viewing the radar measurement image in Google Earth is available at http://aria-share.jpl.nasa.gov/events/20160824-Italy_EQ/interferogram.

Map contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2016, processed by ESA and analyzed by the NASA/JPL-Caltech ARIA team. This research was carried out at JPL under a contract with NASA. Sentinel-1 data were accessed through the Copernicus Open Access Hub.

For more information about ARIA, visit http://aria.jpl.nasa.gov.