Brief communication: Threshold and probability. The conceptual difference between ID thresholds for landslide initiation and IDF curves

Abstract

Intensity-duration (ID) thresholds are used to identify rainfall conditions likely to initiate landslides. They consider the average rain intensity observed over the entire length (called duration) of user-defined wet periods that lead to the triggering. Intensity-duration-frequency (IDF) curves assign a probability to the intensity of precipitation observed over fixed-length temporal windows (also called durations). As the term duration refers to different concepts, ID thresholds and IDF curves cannot be compared directly, and should better not be plotted in one figure, and IDF curves should not be used to quantify the exceedance probability of ID thresholds.