ERS Tandem Data for Earthquake Prediction: Preliminary Results

First results related to the research activity carried out in the framework of the ESA Project AOT.I302 are pre-sented. The project is aimed at integrating spaceborne techniques to measure ground deformation with tradi-tional means of seismic activity monitoring. The San-nio-Matese area, one of the most earthquake-damaged zones in southern Italy, has been chosen as test-site and equipped with 20 corner reflectors and 16 GPS bench-marks, in order to have high-coherence ground control points suitable for DEM validation and phase analysis. Fringe maps and coherence analysis for three available tandem datasets, acquired in May and June, 1996, are presented, together with preliminary results on land use classification and parameters extraction based on the coherent information gathered by the Synthetic Aper-ture Radar (SAR) sensors. The capability of measuring small crustal deformation by means of differential SAR interferometry (DINSAR) is also investigated by ana-lyzing non-tandem datasets.