Identification of sediment-related disaster based on seismic and acoustic signals
Abstract
Sediment-related hazards like landslides, debris flows, and debris floods are an increasing threat to people and property due to the fast socio-economic development of mountain areas and the climatic change. Governmental agencies try to protect settlements and traffic routes by active measures (e.g. retention dams, etc.) and/or passive measures (e.g. land use planning, evacuations, closing of roads and railways in case of acute danger). These measures, and in particular passive approaches, require reliable data/information from monitoring and early warning systems. There have already been several approaches to detect mass moment processes with infrasound and seismic signals, but the combination of both technologies is used very rarely. The correlation of infrasound and seismic signals, can improve the ability of the system to detect events since advantage can be taken of both technologies and the disadvantages can be minimized. (e.g. seismic: lower disturbances due to wind and weather but strong dependency on the geology of the site and high attenuation with increasing distance between mass movement and sensor; infrasound: little attenuation in the air at local distances, but high background noise induced by wind). This project aims to improve a detection system for debris flows based on infrasound and seismic sensors, which has been developed at the Institute of Mountain Risk Engineering at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences and to get out more information from the seismic and infrasound spectrum produced by different sediment related mass movements to identify the process type and estimate the magnitude of the event.
keywords Sediment-related hazards Infrasound Seismic signals Processes-identification