Surface displacements of the 2014 Cephalonia (Greece) earthquake using high resolution SAR interferometry

The island of Cephalonia, Western Greece, was struck by two strong seismic events, with magnitudes, ML= 5.8 and ML = 5.7 which occurred on Jan. 26, 2014 and Feb. 3, 2014 respectively. The first event was located near Argostoli’s town, whereas the second one was located at the north part of Livadi village. These two strong earthquake events followed by smaller aftershocks provoking extensive crustal movements and structural damage effects. Differential Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (DInSAR) is a powerful remote sensing tool for ground motion monitoring. The last two decades, DInSAR is widely applied to a variety of applications including natural hazards such as earthquakes. In 2007, a high resolution X-band satellite namely TerraSAR-X was launched. Due to its short revisit cycle of 11 days and its short wavelength, there is a good potential to capture faster surface movements. This study refers to the application of the DInSAR using TerraSAR-X strip map data to monitor the coand post-seismic surface deformation caused by the second earthquake event. Hence, based on the interferometric processing of multiple scenes, several differential interferograms calculated showing the deformation patterns which caused before and after the seismic event. First results show that the main part of the island shows stability or a small uplift whereas the western part shows a significant deformation pattern. Those results permit to identify the local tectonic setting of the study area and investigate the reasons that some of settlements affected more