Project Description

A landslide is defined as the movement of a mass of rock, debris, or earth down a slope. The zoning of landslide susceptibility on layered landscapes is a key challenge for regional hazard analyses. From a modeling standpoint, the combination of transient infiltration and vertical heterogeneity can lead to hydro-mechanical processes that are difficult to incorporate in spatially distributed frameworks. A physically based model for the efficient generation of regional landslide susceptibility maps in layered landscapes is developed. Model computations rely on a vectorized finite element (FE) solver that performs simulations of vertical unsaturated flow and slope stability analyses. In this project, high performance computing (HPC) will be applied to reduce the computation time for the prediction of a large regional landslide.