Surface Displacement Measurement from Remote Sensing Images

10Measuring Kinematics of Slow-Moving Landslides from Satellite Images

Pascal LACROIX, Benedetta DINI and Aya CHEAIB

ISTerre, Grenoble, France

10.1. Introduction

Landslides result in at least several thousands of victims every year worldwide (Froude and Petley 2018). This global number hides a variety of mechanisms (fall, flow, slide, topple, spread), with different physical processes and associated kinematics (Hungr et al. 2014). One of the main characteristics of landslides is the variability of their kinematics over time. The same landslide may undergo short or long periods of quiescence before suddenly accelerating to reach catastrophic failure (e.g. Intrieri et al. 2018; Lacroix et al. 2020). Therefore, being able to detect landslides and monitor their displacement over time is a major objective of landslide science, with the operational goal of predicting their failure. Remote sensing is a key tool for this purpose.

The specificities of landslides compared to other active geomorphological objects, such as tectonic faults, glaciers or volcanoes, are their rather small size (a 1 km² landslide is already a large object); their wide range of velocities (from mm/yr to m/sec), including the temporal variability of their kinematics; and their presence in steep and high-altitude slopes, where shadows or snow can occur. These different properties make the detection and monitoring of these objects from remote sensing data a challenging task. Moreover, due to the variety of sizes ...