Due to heavy snow fall in winter 2005-2006, two building catastrophes happened in Katowice (Poland) and Moscow (Russia) killing and injuring dozens of people. Roof collapses, caused by heavy snow and ice accumulation were the direct causes, but it was questioned whether other circumstances such as construction stability would play an additional triggering role. Moreover, both buildings were located on unstable areas affected by underground coal mining (Katowice) and karst and suffusion phenomena (Moscow). We performed a stability assessment of the buildings, prior to the collapse, using Persistent Scatterer techniques on time series of SAR data. The main challenge of this study is the identification of a few representative coherent scatterers on individual buildings. The main conclusion of this analysis of ERS1/2 and ENVISAT data is that we found no significant indication of instability before the catastrophes. ... Read more

Recently, two CAT-1 projects have been initiated related to Granada Basin area (Betic Cordillera, Southern Spain), aimed at the detection of deformation in the region applying time series InSAR methodology. Due to the outstanding availability of ERS-1/2 and Envisat acquisitions, a time span of more than 12 years is covered and time series can be produced, enabling us to assess the feasibility of monitoring deformation with millimetre precision. The ultimate goal of these projects is the quantification of displacements and determination of their mean directions, relating them to dynamic changes and stress accumulation in order to identify potential seismic hazard locations. For the moment, not all available scenes have been received, so a preliminary data processing has been carried out at the Padul fault area. In this paper, we present a status report of both projects. ... Read more