New landslide monitoring techniques – developments and experiences of the alpEWAS project

• DOI: 10.1515/jag.2010.008
• Publication Date: 2010-09-17T13:31:22Z
• Authors: Kurosch Thuro; John Singer; Judith Festl; Thomas Wunderlich; Peter Wasmeier; Christoph Reith; Otto Heunecke; Jessica Glabsch; Stefan Schuhbäck
• Keywords: 13. Climate action; 15. Life on land; 01 natural sciences; ddc:; 0105 earth and related environmental sciences

Mainly in the context of global climate change the awareness of landslide hazards has risen considerably in most mountainous regions world- wide in the last years. National and regional hazard mapping programs were set up in many countries and most of the potentially endangered sites have been identified. Although exclusive geodetic and geotechnical instrumentation is available today, due to some economical reasons only few of the identi- fied potentially risky landslides are monitored per- manently. The intention of the alpEWAS research project is to develop and to test new techniques suit- able for e‰cient and cost-eective landslide moni- toring. These techniques are combined in a geo sen- sor network with an enclosed geo data base and a developed software package to use the whole system for stakeholder information and early warning pur- poses. The core of the project is the development and testing of the three innovative measurement systems time domain reflectometry (TDR) for the detection of subsurface displacements in boreholes and reflectorless video tacheometry (VTPS) and a low cost GNSS sensor component for the determi- nation of 3D surface movements. Essential experi- ences obtained during the project will be described.