Satellite Remote Sensing and GIS-Based Assessment of Climate Change Impacts on Soil Stability and Infrastructure Resilience

Abstract

ABSTRACT
Climate change-induced environmental dynamic shifts—characterized by accentuated precipitation extreme regimes, prolonged drought cycles, rapid permafrost thaw, and sea-level rise—are triggering severe soil instabilities worldwide. Slope failures, expansive clay swell-shrink cycles, coastal erosion, and land subsidence pose escalating structural risks to linear and discrete civil infrastructure assets, including highways, railway corridors, foundation systems, and urban embankments. Traditional site-specific geotechnical investigation methods lack the spatiotemporal scalability required to continuously evaluate infrastructure risk across extensive territorial jurisdictions. Satellite Remote Sensing (SRS) integrated with Geographic Information System (GIS) frameworks offers an unprecedented capability for macro- to micro-scale geohazard monitoring, structural deformation tracking, and predictive resilience modeling. This comprehensive review systematically evaluates state-of-the-art earth observation (EO) technologies—incorporating Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (InSAR), high-resolution optical platforms, LiDAR, and multispectral soil moisture retrieval—alongside spatial GIS analytical engines and machine learning (ML) architectures. The operational workflow of data assimilation, feature extraction, constitutive slope stability modeling (e.g., limit equilibrium and finite element analysis coupled with hydro-thermal regimes), and risk assessment is synthesized. Critical operational limitations, including spatiotemporal resolution trade-offs, atmospheric decorrelation, vegetational canopy attenuation, and computational processing bottlenecks, are critically examined. Finally, a strategic research roadmap is outlined, highlighting physics-informed neural networks (PINNs), cloud-native open-source GIS processing pipelines, and multi-constellation satellite fusion to support adaptive civil infrastructure design and predictive maintenance paradigms.

KEYWORDS: Satellite Remote Sensing; GIS; Climate Change; Soil Stability; Infrastructure Resilience; InSAR; Machine Learning; Geohazard Assessment.