Shallow landslides and rockfalls velocity assessment at regional scale: a methodology based on a morphometric approach

Velocity is one of the most important parameters to evaluate the damaging potential of a mass movement, but its assessment, especially for extremely rapid landslides, is a complex task. In the literature, several models to assess mass movement velocity exist, but they usually require many detailed parameters, and therefore, they are applicable only to a single slope and not usable for regional-scale analyses. This study aims to propose a simple morphometric methodology, based on the spatialisation of the Energy Line method, to determine the velocity of shallow landslides and rockfalls at a regional scale. The proposed method requires a limited amount of input data (landslide perimeters and a digital elevation model), and its application can be carried out using GIS software and a Matlab code. The test area of this work is the Valle d’Aosta Region (Northern Italy), selected due to its peculiar geological and geomorphological setting that makes this region susceptible to the occurrence of both shallow landslides and rockfalls. Since measured velocity values for rockfalls and shallow landslides were not available, the results obtained with the proposed method have been validated through the implementation of a model in the literature, namely the Gravitational Process Path (GPP) model, for some selected landslides.