Hillslope stability tools

Here I am on landslides. I gave some contributions to this topics, and I wrote also something about, however I never tried to put a list of models that can be used.

As a general reading I would suggest certainly 

Lu (GS) and Godt, Hillslope hydrology and stability, 2012

It is one of the few books that have a modern approach to quantitative hillslope hydrology. Who starts from it, is already a few years behind others.  Fortunately, Ning Lu covered some of the book chapters in the summer school on landslides held in 2013, and you can also learn directly from his voice and video.

If you have red the book, you can then understand that having at least a 2D tool for assessing hillslope stability is a necessity that you cannot avoid. 

So here they are my favorite tools:

Jgrasstools (see also here) - They contain a SHALSTAB implementation that can be used for comparison. They also contains the necessary tools for terrain analysis. 

CISLAM -  model was originally implemented in R by Cristiano Lanni (GS), but it was ported to JGrasstools in a Google Summer of Code by Marco Foi. I cannot guarantee its quality, since I never used it, but it is built on the theory I co-developed with Cristiano that you can find addressed here. (Jgrasstools are migrated to the gvSIG 2.3 now or are available trough S.T.A.G.E.).

Boussinesq - This is not directly a tool for hillslope stability estimation. However, it serves to estimate the water content (neglecting at the moment, the vadose zone). There are two version of it:  a C version by Emanuele Cordano (stable and working) and a Java version by Francesco Serafin (that is in Java, for being inserted into OMS3, and still a project under construction).

RiDI. - This was developed by Fabio Ciervo in his Ph.D.  it has the peculiarity that it implements a double porosity soil water retention curve proposed by Nunzio Romano (GS) and coworkers.

GEOtop - It was used a lot to this scope, conjointly with simple and less simple hillslope stability analysis (we did some papers with it).

At present, all the tools require to become part of a consistent framework. But we (Giuseppe Formetta -GS-, Francesco Serafin and I) are working on it, looking forward to the next EGU General Assembly in Wien (April 2017). Stay tuned.