Detecting precursors of an imminent landslide  along the Jinsha River

Yang, Wentao; Liu, Lianyou; Shi, Peijun

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-20-3215-2020

Articles | Volume 20, issue 11

https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-20-3215-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue:

Remote sensing and Earth observation data in natural hazard...

https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-20-3215-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 20, issue 11

Research article

|

27 Nov 2020

Research article |

| 27 Nov 2020

Detecting precursors of an imminent landslide along the Jinsha River

Wentao Yang, Lianyou Liu, and Peijun Shi

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Final revised paper (published on 27 Nov 2020)
Preprint (discussion started on 12 May 2020)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Refree's comment', Anonymous Referee #1, 01 Jun 2020
- AC1: 'Response to Referee 1', Wentao Yang, 31 Jul 2020
RC2: 'Comments on deriving slope movements for an imminent landslide along the Jinsha river', Anonymous Referee #2, 14 Jun 2020
- AC2: 'Response to Referee 2', Wentao Yang, 31 Jul 2020

Peer-review completion

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

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (further review by editor and referees) (03 Aug 2020) by Paolo Tarolli

AR by Wentao Yang on behalf of the Authors (23 Aug 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (24 Aug 2020) by Paolo Tarolli

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (05 Sep 2020)

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (01 Oct 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Dear authors,

I have genuinely appreciated the manuscript. I think the text is clear and informative enough in terms of technical details (although I should say that a traditional methodological section is not featured in the text and I should leave the judgement on whether this is appropriate or not to other reviewers).

The figures are also quite nicely displayed, notations are correct and the content well agrees with the results reported in the text.
Overall, I have quite a positive feedback on the manuscript. However, I feel there are few things that can still be substantially improved.

For instance, I find the discussions and conclusions to be lacking from the interpretive standpoint. I would definitely suggest adding a few subsections in the discussion part (quite short and essential right now). In this sense, you could definitely invest more efforts in putting your contribution in context with respect to the current literature. In this way, you could emphasize how different is the work you present as well as potential strengths and weaknesses.

Also, I find the discussions to be lacking on the operational side of the work you present. You could talk to the NHESS readership and mention if you think the procedure you present to be applicable elsewhere. And if yes (which should be the case), what are the complexity one may face in repeating the same analytical protocol.

To explain a bit further what I meant above, I have found the text to be mentioning monitoring activities only twice and mostly as a minor comment. However, I feel the technique you present to be very well versed for monitoring purposes. Assuming this to be true, then you could open up a small discussion on what type of monitoring can actually be done.
Could you monitor all types of landslides? In the study area section, you could provide a better description of the landslide you analyzed. Please consider that the NHESS readership, as your manuscript is right now, has to wait until Section 2.3 to understand what type of landslide you have worked on. And you just use the following sentence: "Evidenced by optical images, the landslide in this work is a translational type and could be dealt with in this way (Highland and Bobrowsky 2013)".

By adding more on the landslide description, you could also call again on this topic in the discussion and mention what type of landslides would be equally recognizable in your multi-temporal displacement estimation? Also, are every environment equally good to support this type of analyses? You mentioned that you initially used the red band because it is less sensitive to atmospheric effects and vegetation cover. Would it be possible to use the same technique in a less vegetated area? Or would you rather use another band in such cases? Also, what if the vegetation would be even denser than the study area you chose? Would your approach be equally successful?
I think that these are the type of questions that the readership of NHESS would appreciate potentially even more than the technical side of the manuscript you present.

This is exactly the point I am trying to raise here. As the manuscript is structured, it feels more like a technical note rather than a research article. My suggestion is to care for the interpretative and story-telling side of your research as much as you did for the technical and method-specific part, which I think you did a good job at describing (although my expertise does not really fall into optical remote sensing).

Please try to consider my suggestions and add a more general or generalizable flavor to your article. Then, I think it would be a nice and complete contribution to read.

On a minor note, there are two typos I have noticed.
In section 2.2, you write "two twine satellites". Please change twine into twin.
Similarly, in section 2.3, you write different illuminations, et al. (Stmpf et al. 2016). Please remove et al before the parentheses and correct the surname of the first author which should be Stumpf.

Good luck,
Luigi Lombardo

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (04 Oct 2020) by Paolo Tarolli

AR by Wentao Yang on behalf of the Authors (13 Oct 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (15 Oct 2020) by Paolo Tarolli

Short summary

We analysed deformation of a moving slope along the Jinsha River from November 2015 to November 2019. The slope is 80 km downstream from the famous Baige landslide, which caused two mega floods affecting downstream communities. This slope was relatively stable for the first 3 years (2015–2018) but moved significantly in the last year (2018–2019). The deformation is linked to seasonal precipitation. If this slope continues to slide downwards, it may have similar impacts to the Baige landslide.