Ning Lu lectures on hillslope processes and (especially) stability, at the Summer School on Landslides

In 2013 University of Calabria organised a very interesting School on Landslide triggering (many thanks to Lino Versace, Giovanna Capparelli and Giuseppe Formetta).  I actually gave a hand to organised it, and  I also gave a lecture on Richards equation.  Waiting for the official post of the lectures at the school site (after which, I will remove my videos), I cannot wait anymore to have on-line the lectures by Ning Lu. He gave four talks taken out of his beautiful book, Hillslope Hydrology and Stability, written with Jonathan Godt, new coordinator of the USGS landslide hazards program, and former co-advisor of my Ph.D. student Silvia Simoni (her thesis here).  A must-watch for any guy in the field !

First talk: A brief conceptual history of soil hydrology and soil mechanics (from Chapter 6 of his book)

Second talk: About Steady infiltration (Chapter 3 of his book)

Third talk, part I: Strength of hillslope materials (Chapter 7 of his book)

Third talk, part II: Hydro-mechanical properties of hillslopes (Chapter 8 of the book)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xokmTXgmTf8

Fourth talk, part I: Failure surfaces  (Chapter 9 the book)

Fourth talk, part II: Field based stability analysis (Chapter 10 of his book)

MORFEO project meeting

The Morfeo project aimed at exploiting the remote sensing techniques for revealing various types of landslides, and built some almost operational tools for doing it. We had the closure of the project last tuesday and wednesday in Rome. We, together with the group of University of Bologna, lead by Enzo Farabegoli, worked on three Alpine catchments in three years of intense field work (Farabegoli), and computer work (us). Farabegoli provides very detailed field data, that could subsequently be used for driving GEOtop simulations. Remote sensing and field survey (see picture below, derived from GEOEye at 50 cm of resolution) were used ti derive, for instance, land use.

Trento's work (especially Mountain-eering) was to use all the information available to get a probabilistic forecasting of hillslope stability based on the methods described in Simoni et al., 2008.

Besides, we produce a working infrastructure around GEOtop to store environmental data (in Postgre-PostGIS plus Ramadda), visualizing them and use them for simulations, finally stored back in the database. A synthetic overview of the results can be found in the
very short overview I did in Rome.

The project is finished but actually some years will be necessary to properly use all the data collected.