Regional Rainfall Warning System for Landslides with Creep Deformation in Three Gorges using a Statistical Black Box Model

Establishing an efficient regional landslide rainfall warning system plays an important role in landslide prevention. To forecast the performance of landslides with creep deformation at a regional scale, a black box model based on statistical analysis was proposed and was applied to Yunyang County in the Three Gorges Reservoir area (TGRA), China. The data samples were selected according to the characteristics of the landslide displacement monitoring data. Then, the rainfall criteria applied to different time periods were determined by correlation analysis between rainfall events and landslides and by numerical simulation on landslide movement under certain rainfall conditions. The cumulative rainfall thresholds that were determined relied on the displacement ratio model, which considered landslide scale characteristics and the statistical relationship between daily rainfall data and monthly displacement data. These thresholds were then applied to a warning system to determine a five-level warning partition of landslides with creep deformation in Yunyang County. Finally, landslide cases and displacement monitoring data were used to validate the accuracy of the model. The validation procedure showed that the warning results of the model fit well with actual conditions and that this model could provide the basis for early warning of landslides with creep deformation.