Towards real-time landslide risk management in an urban area

Advancing Culture of Living with Landslides

The Session Landslide Monitoring and Warning: Monitoring Techniques and Technologies, and Early Warning Systems, as a part of WLF4 Volume 3 Advances in Landslide Technology, collected the contributions that deal with techniques and technologies employed in landslide monitoring and establishing of early warning systems with the aims to reduce or completely eliminate landslide risk. These techniques and technologies include a wide spectra of monitoring equipment united in monitoring sensor networks including modern advanced remote sensing technologies based on satellite observations of Earth surface.

The danger from landslide hazards to people and infrastructures is still rising worldwide. Due to the progressive development of urban areas and infrastructure, more and more people settle in environments that are or become endangered by mass movements. This situation is being complicated by the fact that the dependency of our society on a functioning infrastructure and number of human or objects in endangered areas increases at the same time. Early warning and alarm systems are an efficient tool to face landslide hazards and reduce the risks from landslides, especially where no other mitigation strategies are suitable. However the available technologies are comparatively expensive and not very flexible. Moreover the systems normally represent the state of technology and do not focus the user needs (people centred). The joint project »A Sensor-based Landslide Early Warning System (SLEWS)« aims at a systemic development of a prototyping alarm- and early warning system for different types of landslides utilizing ad hoc wireless sensor networks and spatial data infrastructure technologies according to OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) guidelines for real-time monitoring. Therefore, SLEWS investigates and simulates the whole chain from data gathering and acquisition, evaluation and interpretation, up to data analysis, visualization and data supply for different end users. Besides the technical aspects of alarm and early warning systems, the demands of the users and requirements for an effective warn management are further important research fields within the project.

Progress in Landslide Research and Technology

Globally the prevalence of landslides has increased, impacting more than 4.8 million people between 1998 and 2017 and reported more than 18,000 casualties [UNDP]. The scenario has worsened dramatically, and it has become imperative to develop early warning systems to save human life. This demands the need for systems that could identify the potential of imminent landslides and disseminate the information related to landslide initiation in real-time. This would provide the opportunity to save lives. However, globally the research on reliable end-to-end systems for early warning of landslides is still in its nascent stage. Therefore, this paper explores in detail the requirements for developing systems for real-time monitoring, detection, and early warning of landslides. An integrated solution for building the real-time landslide monitoring and early warning system to provide community-scale disaster resilience is also proposed. This solution integrates multiple modules such as a hete...

For 12 year the University of Wollongong landslide research team has been developing a Geographic Information System based Landslide Inventory of the Wollongong Local Government Area and surrounding areas. This inventory can now provide data in near real-time via the World Wide Web. The inventory includes 569 landslide sites with a total of 956 landslide ‘events’ (includes all known occurrences and recurrences). Of these, four landslide sites are fully automated and continuously monitored, with data from them immediately accessible with a PIN access via the World Wide Web. Emergency response organisations and utility managers, as well as researchers and other stakeholders can monitor the movements, and this is especially important during times of high risk when direct access may be difficult. With an average annual rainfall across the city in the range 1200mm - 1600mm, landslides in Wollongong are primarily triggered by periods of prolonged heavy rainfall. The value to risk manageme...

Fact Sheet

Natural Hazards and Earth System Science, 2013

We define landslide Early Warning Systems and present practical guidelines to assist end-users with limited experience in the design of landslide Early Warning Systems (EWSs). In particular, two flow chart-based tools coming from the results of the SafeLand project (7th Framework Program) have been created to make them as simple and general as possible and in compliance with a variety of landslide types and settings at single slope scale. We point out that it is not possible to cover all the real landslide early warning situations that might occur, therefore it will be necessary for end-users to adapt the procedure to local peculiarities of the locations where the landslide EWS will be operated.

The development of Web-based information systems coupled with advanced monitoring systems could prove to be extremely useful in landslides risk management and mitigation. A new frontier in the field of Rainfall-Triggered Landslides (RTLs) lies in the real-time modeling of the relationship between rainfall and slope stability; this requires an intensive monitoring of some key parameters that could be achieved through the use of modern and often low-cost technologies. This work describes an integrated information system for early warning of RTLs that has been deployed and tested, in a prototypal form, for an Italian pilot site. The core of the proposed system is a wireless sensor network collecting meteorological, hydrological and geotechnical data. Data provided by different sensors and transmitted to a Web-based platform, are used by an opportunely designed artificial neural network performing a stability analysis in near real-time or in forecast modality. The system is able to predict whether and when landslides could occur, providing early warnings of potential slope failures. System infrastructure, designed on three interacting levels, encompasses a sensing level, integrating different Web-based sensors, a processing level, using Web standard interoperability services and specifically implemented algorithms, and, finally, a warning level, providing warning information through Web technologies

A case study: " Tičići " Landslide (overview, investigation works, monitoring results and interpretations)

Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, 2009

PREVIEW is an European Commission FP6 Integrated Project with the aim of developing, at an European level, innovative geo-information services for atmospheric, geophysical and man-made risks. Within this framework, the Landslides Platform Service 2 (forecasting of shallow rapid slope movements) has developed an integrated procedure for the forecasting and warning of distributed shallow landsliding to be used for civil protection purposes.

2021

Landslides are a major societal threat, causing adverse consequences to life, economy and environment. Mitigation of the potential negative effects of landslides commonly involves deployment of challenging and costly measures. This is often the case in the development and operation of linear infrastructures such as road, pipeline and railway networks in landslide-prone areas. One of the commonly employed measures for mitigating the adverse consequences involves monitoring of landslide triggering parameters and issuing timely warnings. Given that the landslide triggering parameters (e.g. large weather systems, local man-made triggers) and the linear infrastructures span varying spatial scales, there is a need for developing a landslide monitoring and early warning system for both regional and local scales. This paper presents a brief introduction of the Norwegian practice for early warning of landslides triggered by extreme weather on regional scale, which has proven to be effective. The criteria for issuing an early warning are based on the degree of saturation of soil and the supply of water to it through rainfall and snow melting. On other hand, monitoring of single slopes on local scales can be quite challenging and expensive. In order to provide landslide monitoring systems of single slopes in affordable price, Indian Institute of Technology Mandi developed a low-cost landslide monitoring and early warning system. These systems are deployed in Mandi district of Himachal Pradesh, India, and monitoring fifteen plus landslide locations. A recent case study is also discussed in this paper where these systems helped in alerting people and traffic from an impending landslide.