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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Earth Sci.
Sec. Geohazards and Georisks
Volume 12 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/feart.2024.1482940
This article is part of the Research Topic Physical Properties and Mechanical Theory of Rock Materials with Defects View all 5 articles

A semi-automatic interpretation method for utilizing InSAR results to recognize active landslides considering causative factors

Provisionally accepted
Weiming Liao Weiming Liao Pengyuan Liu Pengyuan Liu Yanfei Kang Yanfei Kang *Lichuan Chen Lichuan Chen Manqian Liu Manqian Liu Minyan Liao Minyan Liao
  • Chongqing Institute of Geology and Mineral Resources, Chongqing, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (InSAR), which can map subtle ground displacement over large areas, has been widely utilized to recognize active landslides. Nevertheless, due to various origins of subtle ground displacement, their presence on slopes may not always reflect the occurrence of active landslides. Therefore, interpretation of exact landslide-correlated deformation from InSAR results can be very challenging, especially in mountainous areas, where natural phenomenon like soil creep, anthropogenic activities and erroneous deformational signals accumulated during InSAR processing can easily lead to misinterpretation. In this paper, a two-phase interpretation method applicable to regional-scale active landslide recognition utilizing InSAR results is presented. The first phase utilizes statistical threshold and clustering analysis to detect unstable regions mapped by InSAR. The second phase introduces landslide susceptibility combined with empirical rainfall threshold, which are considered as causative factors for active landslides triggered by rainfall, to screen unstable regions indicative of active landslides. A case study validated by field survey indicates that the proposed interpretation method, when compared to a baseline model reported in the literature, can achieve better interpretation accuracy and miss rate.

    Keywords: InSAR1, active landslide2, landslide recognition3, interpretation method4, empirical rainfall thresholds5

    Received: 19 Aug 2024; Accepted: 09 Sep 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Liao, Liu, Kang, Chen, Liu and Liao. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Yanfei Kang, Chongqing Institute of Geology and Mineral Resources, Chongqing, China

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