Enriching flood risk analyses with distributions of soil mechanical parameters through the statistical analysis of classification experiments

Abstract

The distributions of soil mechanical parameters required for a comprehensive flood risk assessment are often taken from the scarce literature available. This article therefore presents a method to indirectly obtain the distributions from the results of often conducted classification tests. Empirical correlation terms are used for the transformation of the classification data into stability-relevant parameters, in particular the void ratio, the soil unit weight, the friction angle and the saturated permeability. The method is applied exemplarily to a data set collected throughout Germany in the immediate vicinity of water bodies and plausible distributions are obtained for 2/3 of the 13 soil classes considered. For the validation of the results, the extension of (inter)national databases by samples of the considered soil mechanical parameters is recommended due to the current poor validation basis.