Thermal remote sensing of the urban microclimate change in a post earthquake depopulation: the case study of L’Aquila (Italy)

This study presents an attempt to use Landsat satellite images to detect the urban microclimate changes of the city centre after the earthquake that affected L'Aquila city (Abruzzo region), on April 2009. In fact, after the main seismic event, the collapse of the most part of the buildings and the consequent almost total depopulation of historic city center may have caused a change in the microclimate. This work targets the development of an inexpensive work flow - by using the Landsat ETM+ scenes - to construe the evolution of the urban land use after the catastrophic earthquake that hit the L’Aquila city on 2009, April 6. The choice to use freely available high resolution remote-sensed images and the Free and Open Source tools for the GIS analysis of the data could help the local governance to monitor the spatial dynamics of the urban area and to state effective policies to manage such events in the long-term and at low cost. We hypothesized, in fact, that probably before the earthquake the temperature was higher in the city center due to the presence of inhabitants (and thus home heating); while the opposite situation happened in the surrounding areas were new settlement of inhabitants grew in few months. The study wants to evaluate if the use of Landsat archive images could provide useful information to understand the urban changes induced by catastrophic events