Abstract
Climate change is set to increase landslide frequency around the globe, thus increasing the potential exposure of people and material assets to these disturbances. Landslide hazard is commonly modelled from terrain and precipitation parameters, assuming that shorter, more intense rain events require less precipitation volume to trigger a slide. Given the extent of non-catastrophic slides, an operable vulnerability mapping requires high spatial resolution. We combined heterogeneous regional slide inventories with long-term meteorological records and small-scale spatial information for hazard modelling. Slope, its (protective) interaction with forest cover, and altitude were the most influential terrain parameters. A widely used exponential threshold to estimate critical precipitation was found to incorrectly predict meteorological hazard to a substantial degree and, qualitatively, delineate the upper boundary of natural conditions rather than a critical threshold. Scaling rainfall parameters from absolute values into local probabilities (per km²) however revealed a consistent pattern across datasets, with the transition from normal to critical rain volumes and durations being gradual rather than abrupt thresholds. Scaled values could be reverted into site-specific nomograms for easy appraisal of critical rain conditions by local stakeholders. An overlay of terrain-related hazard with infrastructure yielded local vulnerability maps, which were verified with actual slide occurrence. Multiple potential for observation bias in ground-based slide reporting underlined the value of complementary earth observation data for slide mapping and early warning.
Highlights
Note that this article deals with the situation in Central Europe, while risk and vulnerability issues probably differ elsewhere, e.g., temporary loss of agricultural production is a minor risk in this paper’s focus
The influence of climate change on the slide occurrence continues to receive much attention, and predicted consequences depend on anticipated changes in precipitation patterns [1]
An increase of rainfall extremes with climate change is both expected from theory and already observed [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10], including Austria [11,12], the geographic focus of this study
Summary
Landslides ( “slides”), as natural disasters, threaten human health and infrastructure. Like other small-scale drivers of slide susceptibility, is not readily observed or modelled at adequate resolution [23], considerable scientific effort has been put into predicting critical saturation levels from their main driver: precipitation The latter is measured and readily available from meteorological data. Two comprehensive reviews [25,26] suggest the following combination of I and D: This nonlinear ID-relationship, first proposed in 1980 [27], has been adopted in these reviews as the model function to fit precipitation thresholds to data from (i) over 800+ slide events from 65 papers (mainly Europe) [25] and (ii) over 2600 observations from numerous studies worldwide [26]. Aaticnogrearnedq,uifirneemceesnstatroy,maadpvabnoctihngsliedxeishtianzgar“dtharnesdhvouldlnfeurnacbtiiloitnys”toosflipdreesc.ipitation is, a core requirement to map both slide hazard and vulnerability to slides
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