Abstract
Rainfall-triggered landslides are one of the most deadly natural hazards in many regions. Seismic recordings have been used to examine source mechanisms and to develop monitoring systems of landslides. We present a semiautomatic algorithm for detecting and locating landslide events using both broadband and short-period recordings and have successfully applied our system to landslides in Taiwan. Compared to local earthquake recordings, the recordings of landslides usually show longer durations and lack distinctivePandSwave arrivals; therefore, the back projection method is adopted for the landslide detection and location. To identify the potential landslide events, the seismic recordings are band-passed from 1 to 3 Hz and the spectrum pattern in the time-frequency domain is used to distinguish landslides from other types of seismic sources based upon carefully selected empirical criteria. Satellite images before and after the detected and located landslide events are used for final confirmation. Our landslide detection and spatial-temporal location system could potentially benefit the establishment of rainfall-triggered landslide forecast models and provide more reliable constraints for physics-based landslide modeling. The accumulating seismic recordings of landslide events could be used as a training dataset for machine learning techniques, which will allow us to fully automate our system in the near future.
Highlights
Landslides and debris flows are one of serious hazards in Taiwan
By including the stations from the short-period network, in addition to the stations in the Broadband Array in Taiwan for Seismology (BATS), into our landslide detection/ location system, we reduced the average interstation distance from over ~30 km to less than ~20 km (Figure 1)
We can organize our landslide detection/ location workflow sequentially into 5 different stages (Figure 4): (i) Stage 1: waveform preprocessing (ii) Stage 2: landslide event detections (iii) Stage 3: inspection of preliminary landslide events (iv) Stage 4: refine location of selected landslide events (v) Stage 5: confirmation of landslide events based on satellite images
Summary
Landslides and debris flows are one of serious hazards in Taiwan. Many events occurred by heavy rainfalls during rainy and typhoon seasons. The constant gravitational pull may cause downslope movement of large volumes of material. These mass movement events occur throughout the world, and under certain circumstances, some of them can produce catastrophic consequences. The general public may sometimes underestimate landslide hazards because many of the landslide events are not reported separately but are included with the descriptions of the events that have triggered them, such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and major rainstorms. Landslides are directly responsible for billions of dollars in damage and thousands of fatalities and injuries each year (e.g., [1])
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