Abstract
A catastrophic landslide happened on 15 March 2019 in Xiangning County of Shanxi Province, causing 20 fatalities. Such an event makes us realize the significance of loess slope instability detection. Therefore, it is essential to identify the potential active landslides, monitor their displacements, and sort out dominant controlling factors. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Interferometry (InSAR) has been recognized as an effective tool for geological hazard mapping with wide coverage and high precision. In this study, the time series InSAR analysis method was applied to map the unstable areas in Xiangning County, as well as surrounding areas from C-band Sentinel-1 datasets acquired from March 2017 to 2019. A total number of 597 unstable sites covering 41.7 km2 were identified, among which approximately 70% are located in the mountainous areas which are prone to landslides. In particular, the freezing and thawing cycles might be the primary triggering factor for the failure of the Xiangning landslide. Furthermore, the nonlinear displacements of the active loess slopes within this region were found to be correlated significantly with precipitation. Therefore, a climate-driven displacement model was employed to explore the quantitative relationship between rainfall and nonlinear displacements.
Highlights
Loess is an aeolian deposit that was accumulated over the past 2.5 million years in arid and semi-arid climate zones [1]
Most diversified and thickest loess accumulation area in the world, called the Loess Plateau covering an area of 640,000 km2
According to a recent study, 14,544 loess landslides are distributed in the Loess Plateau and the loess slope stabilities are affected by multiple factors such as soil properties, geomorphic structure, and rainfall [4]
Summary
Loess is an aeolian deposit that was accumulated over the past 2.5 million years in arid and semi-arid climate zones [1]. The InSAR technique is rarely employed in geohazards identification and monitoring in the Loess Plateau [24]. It has been successfully used in landslides detection in terrace areas (e.g., the South Jingyang [12] and Heifangtai terrace [10,11,25]) with high resolution TerraSAR-X datasets and deformation monitoring due to urban expansion and mountain evacuation (e.g., Lanzhou [26] and Yan’an [27]) with moderate resolution Environmental Satellite (Envisat) Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) and Sentinel-1 datasets. The primary objective of this study is to identify the active loess landslides in the southwest part of Shanxi Province (including Xiangning and surrounding counties) using Sentinel-1 SAR observations from March 2017 to 2019.
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