In recent years, the Global Positioning System (GPS) techniques have been widely applied to monitor the superficial movements of landslides. The main objective of this paper is to ascertain the application of GPS in landslide prediction practice, taking Baishuihe landslide as an example. The 1260 Mm³ Baishuihe landslide (Three Gorge Reservoir, China), susceptible to evolve into a soil slide, is studied. This landslide has been periodically monitored since 2003 with GPS and other conventional equipments. Influencing factors have been recognized through the analysis of the GPS monitoring data. Forecasting the failure of the landslides is difficult because of nonlinear time dependency and seasonal effects, which affect the displacements. According to Crosta's method, Voight model is suggested to forecast fictitious failures and to assess alert velocity thresholds using GPS monitoring data. Voight's equation has been expressed in terms of displacement and used to fit the data by nonlinear estimation techniques. Velocity threshold values have been computed and be used for emergency management by assuming these parameters (α, Α, τ, f, mechanical behaviour of the landslide mass approaching failure.

Date Published: 29 December 2008
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 7285, International Conference on Earth Observation Data Processing and Analysis (ICEODPA), 72854S (29 December 2008); doi: 10.1117/12.811371

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7285:
International Conference on Earth Observation Data Processing and Analysis (ICEODPA)
Deren Li; Jianya Gong; Huayi Wu, Editor(s)