Spaceborne Interferometry for Bridge Monitoring: Advancing Structural Integrity Management Through Remote Sensing

Abstract

Bridges are essential components of civil infrastructure, and ensuring their structural integrity is crucial for public safety and service continuity. Recent advancements in Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (InSAR) have significantly enhanced our ability to remotely monitor structural behavior, offering a valuable complement to traditional inspection and sensor-based methods. The recently published Italian guidelines for InSAR monitoring of civil structures, developed under a project funded by the Italian Civil Protection, provide essential standards and best practices for integrating InSAR into infrastructure management. The European Ground Motion Service, part of the Copernicus program, provides valuable ground motion data across Europe using Sentinel-1 imagery. In addition to routine monitoring, InSAR holds substantial promise for post-event forensic analysis. It can help engineers investigate the underlying causes of bridge failures by revealing patterns of progressive displacement leading to collapse, critical information that traditional inspection and monitoring methods often miss. This keynote explores the use of spaceborne InSAR for structural health monitoring of bridges, focusing on InSAR data clustering for the interpretation of bridge behaviour, and collapse investigation.