Alert threshold assessment based on equivalent displacements for the identification of potentially critical landslide events

Abstract

Over the past years, the growing number of natural hazards all over the world has led to an increasing focus on activities aimed at studying and controlling the occurrence of these phenomena. In this context, monitoring systems have become a fundamental component for Landslide Early Warning Systems, allowing to understand the evolution of these processes and assess the need for dedicated mitigation measures. This result is achieved thanks to several technological advancements that led to the introduction of more accurate and reliable sensors, as well as automatic procedures for data acquisition and elaboration. However, despite these improvements, the data interpretation process is still a challenging task, in particular when it comes to the identification of critical events and failure forecasting operations. This paper presents a methodology developed to assess if a potentially critical event is displaying a significant deviation from previously sampled data, or if it could be classified as a false alarm. The process relies on the definition of a threshold value based on the landslide behavior preceding the event of interest. In particular, the reference value derives from the evaluation of equivalent displacements, defined as the displacements previously observed in a time interval equal to the one showed by the potentially critical event. This paper reports a series of examples referring to different case studies, involving both false alarms and real collapses, underlining the effectiveness of the proposed model as a useful tool to evaluate the landslide behavior with a near-real-time approach.