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This volume discusses the general physics of debris flows and various approaches to modeling - including the SEGMENT-Landslide approach - as well as the pros and cons of these approaches and how other approaches are sub-sets of the SEGMENT-Landslide approach. In addition, this volume will systematically unify the concepts of vadose zone hydrology and geotechnical engineering, with special emphasis on quantifying ecosystem consequences of storm-triggered landslides in a warmer climate setting. The reader will find a comprehensive coverage of concepts ranging from hillslope hydrology, porous granular material rheology and the fundamentals of soil properties, to state-of-the-art concepts of enhanced hydrological cycle with climate warming and a discussion of new approaches for future research.
List of contents
Introduction.- Ecosystem of sloping terrain, soil and vegetation.- Landslides are a double-edged sword.- Strain and Stress.- Landslide dynamics.- SEGMENT-Landslide and applications on various climatic zones.- Changes in extreme precipitation in a future warming climate.- Landslides impact on sea level rise.- Modeling the debris flows in the aftermath of the 2007 Southern California Wildfires.- Opportunity and challenges in a remote sensing era.- The path forward: Landslides in a future climate.- Mathematical skills required to fully understand SEGMENT-Landslide.- Appendix 1: Pressure fields within a simplest granular media - A comment on a recent Science article on locomotors running over sands.- Appendix 2: Cluster analysis.- Appendix 3: Scarp size distribution, who are the players?.- Appendix 4: Basic tensor (and vector) operations.- Appendix 5: GPD analysis of extreme precipitation.- Appendix C1: Lax-Windoff scheme of various order of accuracy (1D followed by a higher order scheme implemented in SEGMENT-Landslide.- Appendix C2: 1D thermal equation solver (semi-implicit C-N scheme).
About the author
Dr. Ren's main interests lie in climate diagnostics, dynamic data assimilation and fluid mechanics, as well as land surface modeling of ecosystem responses to a warming climate, glacier/ice sheet dynamic modeling, natural hazards such as storm-triggered landslides, frozen soil thawing and refreezing processes and soil nutrient fluctuations. He has coded a scalable, extensible and adaptable geo-fluid model (SEGMENT), which offers a unified approach for a disparate set of poorly understood phenomena in geophysical flows/movements such as glacier sudden surge and which is also is capable of describing nutrient content between different vegetation types.
