Temporal evolution of flow-like landslide hazard for a road infrastructure in the municipality of Nocera Inferiore (southern Italy) under the effect of climate change

Uzielli, Marco; Rianna, Guido; Ciervo, Fabio; Mercogliano, Paola; Eidsvig, Unni K.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-18-3019-2018

Articles | Volume 18, issue 11

https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-18-3019-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue:

Landslide early warning systems: monitoring systems, rainfall...

https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-18-3019-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 18, issue 11

Research article

|

14 Nov 2018

Research article |

| 14 Nov 2018

Temporal evolution of flow-like landslide hazard for a road infrastructure in the municipality of Nocera Inferiore (southern Italy) under the effect of climate change

Marco Uzielli, Guido Rianna, Fabio Ciervo, Paola Mercogliano, and Unni K. Eidsvig

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Final revised paper (published on 14 Nov 2018)
Preprint (discussion started on 05 Dec 2017)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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RC1: 'review comments', Anonymous Referee #1, 05 Jan 2018
- AC1: 'Author responses to Reviewer 1', Marco Uzielli, 22 Mar 2018
RC2: 'Review of nhess-2017-416', Anonymous Referee #2, 31 Jan 2018
- AC2: 'Author responses to Reviewer 2', Marco Uzielli, 22 Mar 2018

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (further review by editor and referees) (24 Apr 2018) by Paolo Tarolli

AR by Marco Uzielli on behalf of the Authors (02 Jun 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (19 Jun 2018) by Paolo Tarolli

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (02 Jul 2018)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Overview

The authors propose a method to compute the probability, varying in time according to the climate change, that a location is invested by a landslide occurred elsewhere upstream. The writer carefully read until subsection 1.2 and gave a quick look to the remainder because the manuscript is not easily readable: many sentences are ill structured and entirely or partially appear unclear. The writing is not fluid, somewhere is confused, and somewhere it seems translated italian. The writer suggests the authors to ask for the help of colleagues with a good knowledge of the topic and English writing. In addition, there are also four main deficiencies:

1) The author associate to the word “hazard” the spatial varying probability of a location to be invested by a moving mass resulting from a landslide occurred elsewhere upstream. Such association seems arbitrary. The writer suggests something like “hazard function” or similar. Moreover, the “reach probability” could confuse the reader because reach is also a segment of a channel/river. Perhaps impacting probability could be better: the authors could find a better name for naming the probability of a location to be invested by such a phenomenon.

2) The authors deal with landslide runout and sometimes refer to debris flows. In principle, they are not the same thing. Some of the landside transformed into a debris flow? If this is the case, it should written at the beginning specifying the debris flow type (in present case perhaps some muddy or viscous debris flow: please see figure 1.11 of Takahashi, 2007). At page 3 the phenomena are hyper-concentrated flows, channelized debris flows and un-channelized debris flows. However, table 2 these phenomena are classified as landslide. This does not seem correct. In the text it can ben derived that all the landslide phenomena transformed in flows: hyper-concentrated flows, channelized debris flows and un-channelized debris flows. In such a case it should be correct use the diction debris flow runout. The writer suggests the authors to introduce a specific characterization of the phenomena occurring in the site they are studying.

3) The authors assume that the landslide occurrence and reach probability are distinct parameters (line 12 of page 3). What does it mean? Which is the link between probability and parameter? They assume that these two probabilities are independent: equation (1) deals with a joint probability. Really, the probability of location to be routed by a moving mass seems linked to the probability of the mass moving occurrence. Therefore, the authors should carefully explain this assumption.

4) The authors apply and test the proposed methodology to a reach of the Motorway A3 threatened by the channels incising Mount Albino. The routing modeling at the base of the probability reach calculations is carried out using Flow-R. This model it is a susceptibility model based on empirical parameters that does not consider the volume of the flowing mass. Therefore, the writer suggests the use, for only one channel threatening the motor way reach, of a physically based model (Deangeli, 2008, Armanini et al. 2009, Frank et al. 2015, Stancanelli et al. 2015, Cuomo et al. 2016, and Gregoretti et al. 2016) at the purpose to test the simulations carried out by using flow-R . This comparison should help to increase the reliability of the simulations.

The writer also suggests to add “Southern” before Italy in the title.

The following are the detailed comments to the unclear sentences.

Abstract

At line 19, please substitute “following” with “during the”

Introduction

At page 1 line 27, please substitute “While probability distributions of "shallow" uncertainties in outcomes are “reasonably well known” ” with “Shallow uncertainties are associated to reasonably well know probabilities of outcomes (Stein…..), while (conversely) deep uncertainties are associated to…….

At page 2, line 3 eliminate one of the two issues

At page 2, line 6 please substitute “related to climate change” with “in a changing climate”

At page 2, line 19 please substitute “investigations performed in them” with “relative investigations” and eliminate “For example”.

At page 2, line 21 please substitute “such differences induce variations in rainfall patterns recognized as effective for slope failure” with “Therefore, the critical rainfall pattern inducing slope failure varies according to these differences.

At page 2, line 22 please substitute “For these reasons, while daily weather forcing data have been found to result in better assessments for the Cervinara and Nocera Inferiore test cases, sub-daily data have been found to improve the quality of assessments for the Ravello test case.“ with “Indeed in some locations (Cervinara and Nocera Inferiore), the assessed weather forcing has a daily duration, while in other locations (Ravello) it has sub-daily duration.

At page 2, line 24 please substitute “Consequently, daily observations modified according to projected anomalies (Damiano & Mercogliano 2013) or daily data provided by climate simulations subjected to statistical bias correction are used in the former cases, while a stochastic approach is adopted with bias-corrected data to provide assessments at hourly scale for the latter.” With “Consequently two different approaches are followed for (the scope of such a data elaboration) based on the considered duration. The former relative to daily durations is ………, the latter relative to sub-daily durations is……………”

At page 2, line 27 about the sentence “Moreover, in some studies (Reder et al. 2016; Ciervo et al. 2016; Rianna et al. 2017a, 2017b), slope stability conditions are assessed through expeditious statistical approaches referring to rainfall thresholds, while physically based approaches are preferred in other cases”: which is the link with the sentences at lines 24-27? Moreover, it is also hard to understand. Perhaps the authors mean that critical rainfall thresholds for land slide in some cases are derived on the base of statistics of ??????? and in some cases through slope stability analysis? If this is the case, this is not clear.

At page 2, line 29 the sentence “Finally, climate projections at 8km in the optimized configuration over Italy (Bucchignani et al. 2015) and the Zollo et al. (2014) configuration of COSMO_CLM model (the highest resolution currently available for Italy up to 2100) are used as inputs in the aforementioned case studies, while climate projections from the Euro-CORDEX multimodel ensemble (Giorgi et al. 2016) are adopted in Rianna et al. (2017b). ” could be rewritten specifying that previous studies approached climate projections using two different methodologies. The former …. and the latter………………

At page 3, line 3 the sentence “The present study focuses again on the Nocera Inferiore site, and also makes use, as will be discussed, of rainfall data from the sites of Gragnano and Castellammare di Stabia” could be simply rewritten as “The present study focuses on the Nocera Inferiore site, with the use of rainfall data from the rain gauges located in Gragnano and Castellammare di Stabia”

At page 3, line 6 the writer suggests to introduce the object of the study. The elements of novelty should be written after it.

Armanini, A., Fraccarollo, L., and Rosatti, G., (2009). Two-dimensional simulation of debris flows in erodible channels. Computers and Geosciences. 35(5), 993 - 1006.

Cuomo, S., Pastor, M., Capobianco, V., Cascini, L., (2016). Modelling the space- time bed entrainment for flow-like landslide. Engineering Geology. 212, 10-20. doi10.10116/j.enggeo.2016.07.011

Deangeli, C., (2008). CLaboratory granular flows generated by slope failures. Rock Mechanics and Rock Engineering. 41(1), 199-217.

Frank, F., McArdell, B.W., Huggel C., Vieli. A., (2015). The importance of entrainment and bulking on debris flow runout modeling: examples from the Swiss Alps. Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci. 15, 2569-2583, doi:10.5194/nhess-15-2569-2015

Gregoretti, C., Degetto, M., Boreggio, M., (2016). GIS-based cell model for simulating debris flow runout on a fan. Journal of Hydrology, 534, 326-340, doi:10.1016/j.jhydrol.2015.12.054

Rickenmann, D., Laigle, D., McArdell, B.W., Hubl, J., (2006). Comparison of 2D debris-flow simulation models with field events. Computational Geosciences. 10., 2, 241-264

Stancanelli L. M., Foti E., (2015). A comparative assessment of two different debris flows propagation approaches - blind simulation on a real debris flow event. Natural Hazard Earth System Science, 15, 375-746. doi:10.5194/nhess-15-375-2015.

Takahashi, T., (2007). Debris Flows: Mechanics, Prediction and Countermeasures Taylor and Francis/Balkema, Leiden.

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RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (03 Jul 2018)

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (further review by editor and referees) (16 Jul 2018) by Paolo Tarolli

AR by Marco Uzielli on behalf of the Authors (05 Sep 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (08 Sep 2018) by Paolo Tarolli

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (12 Sep 2018)

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (28 Sep 2018) by Paolo Tarolli

AR by Marco Uzielli on behalf of the Authors (08 Oct 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (14 Oct 2018) by Paolo Tarolli

AR by Marco Uzielli on behalf of the Authors (23 Oct 2018)

Short summary

Landslide hazard at a given location may change over time due to climate change, since the frequency and intensity of landslide-triggering factors such as rainfall can vary significantly. It is important for stakeholders and decision-makers to predict trends in landslide hazard to mitigate the risk of losing lives and material assets. This study contributes an innovative method for the prediction of future variations of rainfall-induced landslides and shows its application to an Italian site.