Application of a Generalized Criterion: Time-of-Failure Forecast and Alert Thresholds Assessment for Landslides

Abstract

The forecast of a landslide time-of-failure and alert thresholds assessment are fundamental aspects of landslide risk prevention and mitigation. The problem has been often considered with a ‘site-specific’ approach, allowing to describe the single event with great accuracy, while hindering its automatic application to other cases featuring different properties. A procedure aimed to define a common behaviour between different cases was developed with the purpose of improving the approach to this topic. Starting from displacement data referring to landslides documented in scientific literature, a series of normalized velocity vs time trends was defined. These curves highlighted a common trend in landslides’ evolution towards failure, thus allowing the assessment of general alert thresholds. In this paper, the generalized criterion is applied to other landslides not included within the initial database, in order to validate the proposed methodology and investigate its effectiveness. The process has been applied to these new cases, studying and describing their evolution from the beginning of the monitoring activity to the final collapse of the landslide, thus simulating real-time data collection and elaboration in order to compare the results with the developed criterion.