TRE ALTAMIRA

TRE ALTAMIRA (Tele-Rilevamento Europa), headquartered in Milan, Italy with offices in Barcelona, Spain and globally, is the world's largest specialist in satellite InSAR (Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar) analysis — the technique that measures millimeter-scale ground deformation by comparing the phase of radar signals from repeat satellite passes over the same area, detecting subsidence, uplift, landslide movement, and infrastructure settlement with precision inaccessible to optical imagery or conventional surveying.

InSAR ground displacement monitoring works by processing time-series stacks of SAR satellite imagery (from Sentinel-1, TerraSAR-X, COSMO-SkyMed, RADARSAT, and other platforms) through the Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSInSAR) and SBAS (Small Baseline Subset) algorithms that TRE developed and patented — identifying stable radar reflectors (building corners, infrastructure, outcrops) and measuring their displacement between successive satellite acquisitions to sub-centimeter annual precision. This produces continuous multi-year deformation time series over hundreds of square kilometers from archived satellite data.

TRE ALTAMIRA's applications span high-value infrastructure and risk management sectors: mining (pit wall stability monitoring, tailings dam settlement), oil and gas (surface subsidence over hydrocarbon reservoirs, pipeline right-of-way monitoring), civil infrastructure (bridge settlement, dam deformation, building subsidence in dense urban environments), transportation (railway embankment monitoring, road cut slope stability), and geohazard assessment (landslide early warning systems, earthquake fault zone monitoring, volcanic ground deformation).

As the reference InSAR provider for NASA (collaborating on scientific validation), ESA (Copernicus service applications), JAXA, and the World Bank's disaster risk programs, TRE ALTAMIRA's methodologies define the industry standard for satellite-based ground displacement monitoring. The company's PSInSAR algorithm commercial license and extensive archive of processed global datasets gives it a technical lead that new entrants require years to replicate. TRE competes with Gamma Remote Sensing, Terrafirma, and TerrMotion in the commercial InSAR services market.