Environmental monitoring of landfills by a downscaling approach

Landfills are an important part of urban society and an accurate analysis of these area are fundamental to improve decision making strategies for planning anthropic activities. The optimization of new techniques for the monitoring of landfills represents a crucial issue since usual investigation methods are expensive and time-consuming. The application of remote sensing improves the monitoring of different environmental matrices and the assessment of gas and leachate migration. Reflectance spectroscopy approach can be adopted to investigate the stressed vegetation or soil pollution due to waste deposits developing site-depending spectral indices which are linked to bio-chemicals factors. This paper describes a multi-source approach based on the use of remote sensing data and spatial processing techniques to monitor the environmental condition around landfill. This approach was applied during the NO-GAS Regional Operational Programme Project (POR), focusing on emissions from landfills, both punctual and spread.