Impacts of Unsaturated Zone Soil Moisture and Groundwater Table on Slope Instability
Publication: Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 136, Issue 10
Abstract
The combined effect of soil moisture in unsaturated soil layers and pore-water pressure in saturated soil layers is critical to predict landslides. An improved infinite slope stability model, that directly includes unsaturated zone soil moisture and groundwater, is derived and used to analyze the factor of safety’s sensitivity to unsaturated zone soil moisture. This sensitivity, the change in the factor of safety with respect to variable unsaturated zone soil moisture, was studied at local and regional scales using an active landslide region as a case study. Factors of safety have the greatest sensitivity to unsaturated zone soil moisture dynamics for shallow soil layers and comparatively deep groundwater tables (1 m). For an identical groundwater table, the factor of safety for a 1 m thick soil mantle was four times more sensitive to soil moisture changes than a 3-m thick soil. At a regional scale, the number of unstable areas increases nonlinearly with increasing unsaturated zone soil moisture and with moderately wet slopes exhibiting the greatest sensitivity.
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Acknowledgments
We acknowledge NASA’s research funding through Earth System Science Fellowship, Grant No. UNSPECIFIEDNNG05GP66H, for this research. We would also like to thank Dr. M. E. Reid of the U.S. Geological Survey for providing information about Cleveland Corral Landslide area and their groundwater measurements. We are indebted to three reviewers whose extensive comments greatly improved the manuscript.
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Published In
Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 136 • Issue 10 • October 2010
Pages: 1448 - 1458
Copyright
© 2010 ASCE.
History
Received: Aug 14, 2009
Accepted: Mar 8, 2010
Published online: Mar 19, 2010
Published in print: Oct 2010
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