Automatic Detection of Sediment-Related Disasters Based on Seismic and Infrasound Signals

Abstract

The automatic detection of sediment related disasters like landslides, debris flows and debris floods, gets increasing importance for hazard mitigation and early warning. Past studies showed that such processes induce characteristic seismic signals and acoustic signals in the infrasonic spectrum which can be used for event detection. So already many studies has been done on signal processing and detection methods based on seismic or infrasound sensors. But up to date no system has been developed which uses a combination of both technologies for an automatic detection of debris flows, debris floods or landslides. This work aims to develop a system which is based on one infrasound and one seismic sensor to detect sediment related processes with high accuracy in real time directly at the sensor site. The developed system compose of one geophone, one infrasound sensor and a microcontroller where a specially developed detection algorithm is executed. Further work tries to get out more information of the seismic and infrasound signals to enable an automatic identification of the process type and the magnitude of an event. Currently the system is installed on several test sites in Austria, Switzerland and Italy and these tests show promising results.