EGMS RASTOOL: European ground motion risk assessment tool

ended

European Ground Motion Service (EGMS) aims to provide consistent, regular, standardized, harmonized and reliable information regarding natural and anthropogenic ground motion phenomena over Europe and across national borders, with millimetre accuracy (https://land.copernicus.eu/pan-european/european-ground-motion-service). The Service will distribute annually updated satellite interferometric products with a free and open policy. A wide spectrum of users will have access, in many cases for the first time, to nation-wide ground motion results. This is clearly a great opportunity for the geohazard community to expand the knowledge of a territory (in terms of active motion) and downstream the EGMS data at national and local level. However, past experiences at national level with similar services shown that this kind of product is certainly rich and useful for the scientific community, but it is not well received or commonly exploited by decision makers as territorial managers or Civil Protection Authorities (CPAs). There are several reasons beyond this under use. These types of products provide big amounts of data whose analysis is time consuming and hard to manage for Civil Protection Authorities. The data interpretation is not always straight forward demanding a high level of expertise and a specific background. This is something not always available within the organizational chart of a CPA. Finally, the interferometric data are perceived as ‘raw’ products, nice to have for their content but which are not essential for the CPA’s activities.In this context, RASTOOL aims to provide CPA practitioners with the appropriate set of tools for simplifying the EGMS data, to automatically analyze the results and to generate maps to support hazard, exposure and risk-assesment against geohazards, both natural and anthropogenic.