Presenting regional shallow landslide movement on three-dimensional digital terrain
Citation
Chen, H.X., Zhang, L.M., Gao, L., Zhu, H., Zhang, S. (2015). Presenting regional shallow landslide movement on three-dimensional digital terrain. Engineering Geology, 195: 122-134. Link to paper
Abstract
This paper presents a distributed cell model to simulate regional shallow landslide movement over three-dimensional terrain. The framework integrates digital terrain representation, spatial rainfall distribution, infiltration analysis, slope stability evaluation, and movement prediction. Detached material is routed cell-to-cell along steepest descent paths, while empirically derived travel-distance relationships are used as stopping criteria. The model explicitly considers landslide size effects and uncertainty in both geotechnical parameters and movement behavior to estimate bounds of runout distance. Application to a 164.5 km2 hilly region in the Wenchuan earthquake zone shows reasonable agreement between predicted and observed landslide volumes, movement traces, and deposition locations.