Use of Copernicus Satellite Data to Investigate the Soil-Structure Interaction and Its Contribution to the Dynamics of A Monitored Monumental Building

An advantageous opportunity in the context of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is represented by the use of satellite remote sensing data, which are becoming increasingly relevant in many areas with different purposes thanks to their wide temporal and spatial availability, versatility and low cost. As an example, recent applications of satellite interferometric data, which can detect centimetric even up to millimetric scale displacement, concerned the monitoring aggregated buildings in urban areas, the effects of land subsidence in built environments, and lately, the anomalies detection in single structures or infrastructures. However, there are still no applications in the SHM field of other types of satellite data in the literature, such as those coming from multispectral sensors. In the present paper, the application of satellite data from the Copernicus program of the European Space Agency (ESA) is proposed and explored. In particular, Land Surface Temperature (LST) parameter is selected to characterize the foundation soil of our case study - the sanctuary of Vicoforte - an 18th century Italian monumental church whose dome holds the world record of size among oval masonry domes. The study aims to address one key issue in the context of vibration-based SHM of buildings, i.e. the influence of the foundation soil and its changing properties on the dynamics of the system. Here, an early data-based approach is validated and supported through the use of a Finite Element Model (FEM), with the objective to simulate and quantify the effects of thermal variation on the global dynamic response of the system.