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Viscoplastic modelling of rainfall-driven slow-moving landslides: application to California Coast Ranges

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Abstract

Slow-moving landslides are widely observed in mountainous areas worldwide. While most of these landslides move slowly downslope over long periods of time, some ultimately accelerate rapidly and fail catastrophically. Simulating the landslide creep movement triggered by environmental factors such as precipitation, is therefore necessary to anticipate potential damaging effects on proximal infrastructure, habitat, and life. Here, we present a physically-based model that links pore-water pressure changes in the landslide mass with a new viscoplastic constitutive law designed to capture different temporal trends in slow-moving landslides. The model accounts for landslide velocity changes caused by rainfall infiltration through the Terzaghi’s effective stress principle, thus directly resolving the deformation of the active shear zone. Calibration and validation of the computations benefited from both ground-based and remote sensing data for three active landslides in the California Coast Ranges, USA. We find that our model can accurately describe both slow quasi-continuous and episodic movement commonly displayed by active landslides. Although inherent limitations of the viscoplasticity framework did not enable us to describe catastrophic landslide acceleration, our model provides versatile tools that can be used to analyze and describe distinct types of slow-moving landslide dynamics.

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Funding

This work was supported by Grant No. ICER-1854951 awarded by the U.S. National Science Foundation. Topographic data are provided by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) under data proposal DEM GEOL1478 awarded to A. L. H. To acquire these data, proposals may be submitted to the DLR online (https://tandemx-science.dlr.de/). Part of this research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, USA

    Xiang Li & Giuseppe Buscarnera

  2. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA

    Alexander L. Handwerger

  3. Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science and Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, USA

    Alexander L. Handwerger

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  1. Xiang Li
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Correspondence to Giuseppe Buscarnera.

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Appendix: Back calculation of the hydraulic parameters for Boulder Creek and Mud Creek landslides

Appendix: Back calculation of the hydraulic parameters for Boulder Creek and Mud Creek landslides

Since there is no ground-based monitoring of pore-water pressure changes for Boulder Creek and Mud Creek landslides, we modeled the hydraulic response based on observations from the Minor Creek site. To do this, we assumed that the sliding surface of three studied cases each experienced similar hydrological changes driven by rainfall. Our assumption is justified based on the hydrological observations of KJf (Iverson and Major 1987; Schulz et al. 2018a, b; Hahm et al. 2019; Finnegan et al. 2021).

To calibrate the model parameters for Boulder Creek and Mud Creek, we use the observed data from Minor Creek. We then adjusted the modeled landslide thickness for Minor Creek to back-calculate the hydraulic parameters required to match the observations assuming a 20-m thick (Mud Creek) and 40-m thick (Boulder Creek) landslide.

Fig. 10
figure 10

Calibration of Boulder Creek and Mud Creek hydraulic parameters. a Simulation of Minor Creek with 40-m depth. b Simulation of Minor Creek with 20-m depth

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Figure 10a shows that when we change the thickness of Minor Creek to 40 m (i.e., Boulder Creek thickness), the ks (saturated permeability) increases to 4.6E − 6 m/s and Ss (storage coefficient) changes to 0.03 m−1 to simulate a similar hydrological response. Similarly, as depicted in Fig. 10b, when we change the thickness of Minor Creek to 20 m (i.e., Mud Creek thickness) we must change the ks 4.6E − 6 m/s and Ss 0.07 m−7 to obtain a similar result. The deeper the infiltrated depth, the higher the diffusivity that is required to obtain the same hydrological response (Eq. 1).

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Li, X., Handwerger, A.L. & Buscarnera, G. Viscoplastic modelling of rainfall-driven slow-moving landslides: application to California Coast Ranges. Landslides 20, 1101–1113 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-023-02039-1

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