How Many Rainfall-Induced Landslides Are Detectable by a Regional Seismic Monitoring Network?

Abstract

Mass wasting events occurring on the Earth’s surface may induce seismic signals, which can be recorded also at tens of kilometers from the source area. The waveforms relevant to mass wasting differ from those caused by earthquakes, because they are usually characterized by a cigar shaped waveform, duration of several tens of seconds, and low frequencies (1–10 Hz). In literature, no studies have performed a systematic analysis on comprehensive catalogues of rainfall induced landslide records at regional scale. In this work, we analyze the seismic waveforms of 1058 landslides induced by rainfall in Italy, spanning the period between 2000 and 2014. Seismic data are gathered by several European research infrastructures and collected in the European Integrated Data Archive of the Observatories and Research Facilities for European Seismology. We present preliminary results obtained from this large effort, as well as some first statistical considerations on the rainfall-triggered landslides identified within seismic records. Such analyses may provide important insights for the development and calibration of automatic landslide identification algorithms, which might be then used to verify the validity of landslide forecasting procedures based on rainfall thresholds, as well as to enhance the catalogues completeness by exploiting quantitative measures and relying not only chronicle information.