Integrated Physically based System for Modeling Landslide Susceptibility

Rainfall induced shallow landslides cause significant damages involving loss of life and properties. Predict susceptible locations for rainfall induced shallow landslides is a complex task that involves many disciplines: hydrology, geotechnical science, geomorphology, statistic. Usually to accomplish this task two main approaches are used: statistics or physically based model. In this paper an integrated system for early warning of rainfall induced shallow landslides is presented. It is based on a hydrological model for solving 3D-Richards equation, a component for safety factor maps computation under infinite slope hypothesis and a GIS for model outputs visualization. The system is tested in Calabria (South Italy) for two river basins in which landslides occurred in the period from 8 to 10 March 2010. Results in terms of time evolution and spatial maps of safety factor at various depths are presented and compared to landslides maps.