Dynamic assessment of rainfall-induced shallow landslide hazard

Abstract

The assessment of rainfall-induced shallow landslide hazards is a significant issue in the Three Gorges Reservoir area in China due to the rapid development of land in the past two decades. In this study, a probabilistic analysis method that combines TRIGRS and the point-estimate method for evaluating the hazards of shallow landslides have been proposed under the condition of rainfall over a large area. TRIGRS provides the transient infiltration model to analyze the pore water pressure during a rainfall. The point-estimate method is used to analyze the uncertainty of the soil parameters, which is performed in the geographic information system (GIS). In this paper, we use this method to evaluate the hazards of shallow landslides in Badong County, Three Gorges Reservoir, under two different types of rainfall intensity, and the results are compared with the field investigation. The results showed that the distribution of the hazard map is consistent with the observed landslides. To some extent, the distribution of the hazard map reflects the spatial and temporal distribution of the shallow landslide caused by rainfall.