Exploring Problems and Prospective of Satellite Interferometric Data for the Seismic Structural Health Monitoring of Existing Buildings and Architectural Heritage

Satellite interferometric data represent a promising source of information for the Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) of the existing built environment. This is especially true because they show differential temporal-spatial displacements of remotely monitored points, which can be easily interpreted with a visual inspection of their time-histories for different locations defined a priori. However, the interferometric information is commonly referred to extended territories (at the scale of city or region), thus several problems arise in the implementation of automatic SHM techniques for the damage detection, localization, and assessment of the built environment at a point level (scale of the building or lower). Despite a long list of challenges, interferometric data have also the potential to become a useful source to assess the health of a structure, especially for helping in define structural early warning methodologies. For this reason, in the paper, the authors summarize the main challenges in the use of satellite interferometric data for civil SHM, and rather than proposing remedial actions, try to critically analyze the challenges and perspectives for future applications.