The Copernicus European Ground Motion Service (EGMS - https://land.copernicus.eu/pan-european/european-ground-motion-service) will distribute annually updated satellite interferometric products with a free and open policy over the Copernicus Participating States. A wide spectrum of users will have access, in many cases for the first time, to nation-wide ground motion results. This clearly represents a great opportunity for the geohazard community to expand the knowledge of a territory in terms of active motion. However, past experiences with similar services at national level have 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 such as Civil Protection Authorities. There are several reasons beyond this under use. These types of products provide a big amount of data whose analysis is time consuming and hard to manage for Civil Protection Authorities. Data interpretation is not always straight forward, demanding a high level of expertise and a specific background. Finally, the interferometric data are perceived as ‘raw’ products, nice to have for their content but sometimes not essential for the civil protection activities.

RASTOOL aims to provide CPA practitioners with the appropriate set of tools for simplifying the EGMS data, to automatically analyse them and to generate maps to support hazard, exposure and risk-assessment against geohazards, both natural and anthropogenic. RASTOOL will develop the necessary tools to semi-automatically transform the EGMS outputs, composed of billions of point-like measurements, in maps ready to be use in the disaster risk management cycle. The goal is to maximise the impact of EGMS in the implementation of disaster risk reduction and management policies.

The project aims to be a step forward on the ground motion hazards management addressing the following issues:

(a) Relative limited knowledge on active ground motion in cross border regions. National and regional projects based on satellite interferometry exist, but the cross border dimension is not addressed. Thus, there is a real need for good practices and tools usable by different national entities of border countries. RASTOOL will provide users with easy-to-use tools able to generate derived products ready to be implemented in Civil Protection practices.

(b) Limited knowledge and trust of Civil Protection authorities - and risk management entities in general - of satellite interferometric products. InSAR data are more and more used, but the level of knowledge and trust of stakeholders is not comparable yet with other remote sensing resources. RASTOOL is designed to bridge this gap and to demonstrate, primary to Civil Protection authorities, that the interferometric products can have a real impact on every-day activities and are not a pure ground motion estimation.

(c) The involvement of end users is a fundamental part of RASTOOL. The project will try to construct a continuous collaboration with stakeholders and end users; this intention is testified by the presence of civil protection authorities and national geological surveys as active part of the project. User needs will be defined at the start of the project with the collaboration of the involved stakeholders and then re-evaluated at different stages of the project. A final gap analysis will demonstrate if the project accomplished to the largest number of requirements.