Abstract
An airborne laser scanner can identify shallow landslides even when they are only several meters in diameter and are hidden by vegetation, if the vegetation is coniferous or deciduous trees in a season with fewer leaves. We used an airborne laser scanner to survey an area of the 1998 Fukushima disaster, during which more than 1,000 shallow landslides occurred on slopes of vapor-phase crystallized ignimbrite overlain by permeable pyroclastics. We identified landslides that have occurred at the 1998 event and also previous landslides that were hidden by vegetation. The landslide density of slopes steeper than 20° was 117 landslides/km2 before the 1998 disaster. This event increased the density by 233 landslides/km2 indicating that this area is highly susceptible to shallow landsliding.
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Acknowledgment
This research was funded by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT)—Special Coordination Fund for Promoting Science and Technology, Aerial Prediction of Earthquake and Rain Induced Flow Phenomena (APERIF Project), Principal Investigator: Kyoji SASSA. We appreciate the discussion and the help in the field survey of Noriyuki Chiba of Tohoku Gakuin University and Jun Umemura of Nihon University. We are also grateful to Tatsuro Chiba, of Asia Air Survey, for his help in the imaging analysis of DEM data.
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Chigira, M., Duan, F., Yagi, H. et al. Using an airborne laser scanner for the identification of shallow landslides and susceptibility assessment in an area of ignimbrite overlain by permeable pyroclastics. Landslides 1, 203–209 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-004-0029-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-004-0029-x