Rainfall Triggered Slope Instability Analysis with Changing Climate

Slope instability triggered by rainfall is common in tropical countries like India, where the soil of hill slopes are generally in unsaturated condition, having higher strength than in the saturated condition due to matric suction. This study aims to investigate the change in pore water pressure (PWP) with rainfall infiltration into the slope and the corresponding effect of the slope stability on different hill slopes from different regions of India. By applying rainfall on the surface of slope as a flux boundary condition, a transient seepage analysis is performed using SEEP/W, and the corresponding results in the form of PWP distribution within the slope are used as input for SLOPE/W program of Geostudio 2018 R2, to check the stability of slope. This study involves the use of CMIP5 (Coupled model intercomparision project phase 5) simulations for rainfall data of different regions for the duration of 2015–2050, 2051–2075 and 2076–2100; which is completely based on non-stationary approach (i.e., the statistics of extremes changes with time) rather than the conventional methods of extracting rainfall data that are based on stationary approach. The stability of different slopes is checked for 95 percentile rainfall intensity as well as for maximum rainfall intensity for a period of 2015–2100, and the analysis is performed for 5 days for which the duration of rainfall is considered to be 24 h. It is concluded that due to climate change, slopes which may be marginally stable under historical and present rainfall events can fail under projected precipitation estimates, and this can be understood by the results of Haflong slope stability analysis as the 30° slope, which is marginally stable under maximum rainfall intensity for the period 2015–2050 having factor of safety (FOS) value 1.0013, will fail under the maximum rainfall intensity for the period 2051–2075 and 2076–2100 having FOS value 0.9935 and 0.9989, respectively. A continuous decrease in FOS with increasing rainfall intensity is observed for all the study areas under consideration.