Pre-processing algorithms and landslide modelling on remotely sensed DEMs

Abstract

Terrain analysis applications using remotely sensed Digital Elevation Models (DEMs), nowadays easily available, permit to quantify several river basin morphologic and hydrologic properties (e.g. slope, aspect, curvature, flow path lengths) and indirect hydrogeomorphic indices (e.g. specific upslope area, topographic wetness index) able to characterize the physical processes governing the landscape evolution (e.g. surface saturation, runoff, erosion, deposition). Such DEMs often contain artifacts and the automated hydrogeomorphic characterization of the watershed is influenced by terrain analysis procedures consisting in artificial depression (pit) and flat area treatment approaches combined with flow direction methods. In shallow landslide deterministic models, when applied using topographic dataset at medium scale (e.g. 30 m of resolution), the choice of the most suitable DEM-processing procedure is not trivial and can influence model results. This also affects the selection of most critical areas for further finer resolution studies or for the implementation of countermeasures aiming to landslide risk mitigation. In this paper such issue is investigated using as topographic input the ASTER DEMs and comparing two different combinations of DEM correction and flow routing schemes. The study areas comprise ten catchments in Italy for which hydrogeomorphic processes are significant. Aims of this paper are: 1) to introduce a parameter estimation procedure for the physically-based DEM correction method PEM4PIT (Physical Erosion Model for PIT removal); 2) to investigate the influence of different terrain analysis procedures on results of the slope stability model SHALSTAB (SHAllow Landsliding STABility) using remotelysensed ASTER DEMs; 3) trying to assess which of terrain analysis methods is more appropriate for describing terrain instability.