Milillo's Lab
Research
We use synthetic aperture radar to measure how the Earth’s surface moves, and how the structures built on it respond. Ice sheets lose contact with their beds. Bridges deflect under load. Ground fails after an earthquake. However, the deformation that matters is often millimetric and short-lived. We exploit the synergistic use of satellite constellations to recover it at mm/year precision, at spatial and temporal scales not reasonably accessible with in situ measurements.
Research themes
Cryosphere and ice-sheet dynamics
Where an ice sheet loses contact with its bed, and how fast that boundary is moving.
The problem
The grounding line is the boundary where an ice sheet stops resting on bedrock and begins to float. It is not a line and it does not hold still: it migrates by kilometres over a single tidal cycle, and it retreats over years as warm ocean water reaches further beneath the ice. Its position sets how much ice is exposed to ocean melt, which is why models are so sensitive to it.
How we measure it
We map the grounding zone from short-repeat radar interferometry. One-day and four-day repeat passes from COSMO-SkyMed, TanDEM-X and Sentinel-1 resolve the tidal flexure hinge directly, so migration can be separated from long-term retreat rather than confounded with it.
What we have found
Thwaites Glacier
Retreat of 0.8 km/yr in the fastest sector, with floating ice melting at 200 m/yr, while adjacent sectors retreat at 0.3 km/yr and melt ten times slower.
Pine Island Glacier
The grounding line migrates over a zone 2.5 km wide at tidal frequencies in 2016-2017, against 0.5 km in 1996.
Model gap
Measured retreat rates outpace what coupled ice-sheet and ocean models anticipate on yearly time scales.
Papers on this theme 19
Showing the 6 most relevant of 19. See all 92 publications.
Geophysical Research Letters · 2017
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023
Cryosphere · 2022
Geophysical Research Letters · 2020
International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS) · 2017
Heterogeneous retreat and ice melt of Thwaites Glacier, West Antarctica
Science Advances · 2019
Infrastructure and structural health
Millimetre-scale movement of bridges, dams and buildings, measured from orbit.
The problem
Structures fail slowly before they fail suddenly. The deformation that precedes failure is often a few millimetres per year, distributed across a structure rather than concentrated at one instrumented point. Ground instrumentation measures that well but only where it has been installed, and it is rarely installed before anyone suspects a problem.
How we measure it
Interferometric radar measures displacement along the satellite line of sight across the whole structure at once, from archives that already exist. That makes retrospective analysis possible: the measurement can be made after the event, from data acquired before it.
What we have found
Morandi Bridge, Genoa
Space geodetic observations recorded deformation on the bridge in the years before its 2018 collapse.
Mosul Dam, Iraq
Long-term interferometric survey confirms ongoing destabilization of the dam.
Tunnelling settlement
InSAR monitoring data evaluated against field measurements for post-tunnelling building damage assessment.
Papers on this theme 36
Showing the 6 most relevant of 36. See all 92 publications.
Integrated InSAR monitoring and structural assessment of tunnelling-induced building deformations
Structural Control and Health Monitoring · 2021
Evaluation of InSAR monitoring data for post-tunnelling settlement damage assessment
Structural Control and Health Monitoring · 2019
Monitoring Bridge Vibrations via Spaceborne SAR Micro-Doppler
Structural Control and Health Monitoring · 2026
Procedia Structural Integrity · 2024
Structural evaluation of urban bridges in Amsterdam through InSAR-based displacement data
11th European Workshop on Structural Health Monitoring, EWSHM 2024 · 2024
Proceedings of SPIE – The International Society for Optical Engineering · 2016
Multi-hazard disaster response
Mapping damage in the days after an event, not the months.
The problem
After an earthquake or a flood, the useful window for damage information is measured in days. Field reconnaissance cannot cover a region that fast, and optical satellites are stopped by cloud and by night. The constraint is not sensing capability but latency.
How we measure it
Radar sees through cloud and does not need daylight. We combine tasking of commercial smallsat constellations with interferometric coherence change detection, which flags where the ground scattering properties changed between passes. That is a proxy for structural damage that can be produced without a pre-event field survey.
What we have found
Gorkha 2015, Mw 7.8
Rapid damage mapping from synthetic aperture radar following the Nepal earthquake.
Commercial onramp
Evaluation of ICEYE, Capella and Umbra high-resolution SAR for low-latency multi-hazard damage mapping, under NASA's commercial smallsat programme.
Landslides
Spotlight interferometry over rural terrain, applied to the Slumgullion landslide, Colorado.
Papers on this theme 30
Showing the 6 most relevant of 30. See all 92 publications.
Quantitative assessment of earthquake-induced building damage at regional scale using LiDAR data
International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction · 2024
International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation · 2024
Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering · 2025
Lessons for Remote Post-earthquake Reconnaissance from the 14 August 2021 Haiti Earthquake
Frontiers in Built Environment · 2022
The EEFIT Remote Sensing Reconnaissance Mission for the February 2023 Turkey Earthquakes
IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing · 2024
Combining remote sensing techniques and field surveys for post-earthquake reconnaissance missions
Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering · 2024
SAR methods and machine learning
Getting more out of the same radar data than the acquisition was designed for.
The problem
A radar acquisition contains more information than the standard processing chain extracts. Sub-aperture phase carries vibration. Optical and radar data carry complementary information that neither alone resolves. And the volume of imagery now available exceeds what can be interpreted by hand.
How we measure it
We work on the extraction side rather than the acquisition side: micro-motion and sub-aperture phase analysis for vibration, self-supervised optical-SAR fusion for classification, and vision-language models for damage assessment that can explain their own output.
What we have found
Vibration from a single pass
Micro-motion analysis recovers target velocities as low as 0.01 m/s from one high-resolution X-band image, validated in Trento and Glasgow.
Interpretable damage
Vision-language models applied to multi-hazard damage assessment with commercial satellite data.
Automated grounding lines
Deep learning and phase-gradient methods for grounding line delineation, replacing manual digitisation.
Papers on this theme 38
Showing the 6 most relevant of 38. See all 92 publications.
Remote Sensing of Environment · 2024
International Journal of Digital Earth · 2024
Sentinel-1-Aided Mutual Calibration of TanDEM-X DEMs for the Estimation of Height and Volume Changes
IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing · 2025
Global seasonal Sentinel-1 interferometric coherence and backscatter data set
Scientific Data · 2022
Remote Sensing · 2014
Frontiers in Earth Science · 2022
Study sites
Where the work happens
Every study site named in the group’s publications. Drag to rotate, scroll to zoom, or pick a site below.
Active & recently awarded grants
Building the Next-Generation Geomatics Workforce Through InSAR, Photogrammetry, LiDAR and Multimodal 3D Reconstruction at the University of Houston
Uncertainty-Aware NISAR Damage Mapping for Disaster Response
Interpretable Multi-hazard Damage Assessment with Vision-Language Models and Commercial Satellite Data
Rapidly estimating regional earthquake impacts using commercial satellite data
Volcano topography science and applications observation needs for STV
STV Applications Needs
Surface Topography and Biomass Resolution Needs for Enabling Wildfire and Vegetation-Atmosphere Modeling and Forecasts
Completed projects
COSMO-SkyMed Grounding line Dynamics in Antarctica
Evaluating Umbra Space High-resolution Data for low-latency multi-hazard Damage Mapping Practices
Evaluating Umbra high-resolution SAR data for sustainable water management practices and flood inundation forecasts Advancing SAR and Electro-optical data analysis for the FIRE Sense Team
Using high-resolution commercial smallsat and citizen science data for post-earthquake reconnaissance missions
Evaluating Capella Space high-resolution data for Coastal Monitoring and Sustainable Water Management Practices
Evaluating ICEYE Space high-resolution data for Coastal Monitoring and Sustainable Water Management Practices
Earth System Data Record of Ice Motion, Grounding Line, and Bed Topography in Antarctica from NISAR and other sensors
New observing strategies for beach and dune topography and implications for coastal flood risk
Multi-Temporal Anomaly Detection for SAR Earth Observations
AFRL ML-RCP · Self-supervised optical-SAR fusion
Funding from NASA, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Air Force Research Laboratory, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and the Italian Space Agency (ASI).