Impact of precipitation on Beishan landslide deformation from 1986 to 2023

Abstract

Investigating the response of landslide activity to climate change is crucial for understanding the disastrous effects of climate change on high mountains. However, the lack of long-term, spatial–temporal consistent measurement of landslide activity prohibits the study of this relationship. In this work, we used two methods to derive the time series of a landslide’s deformation and study its relationship with precipitation in the northeastern Tibetan Plateau. The small baseline subset-interferometric synthetic aperture radar (SBAS-InSAR) method with Sentinel-1A images is first applied to derive time series of the landslide’s deformation from 2020 to 2021. A recently developed method to derive cumulative deformations of optical images was used with Landsat 5 and Sentinel-2 images to derive the long-term deformation time series from 1986 to 2023. Centimeter-scale deformations detected by using the InSAR method are mainly located in the upper and eastern parts of the landslide, whereas meter-scale deformations detected by using the optical method are in the middle of the landslide. Time-series results from both methods show that intra-annual initiations of the landslide’s deformation occurred in rainy months (from July to October). Although there seems to be no direct relations between inter-annual deformations and precipitation, significant displacements since 2020 occurred after exceptionally wet years from 2018 (with a record-breaking precipitation year in 2020). With optical images, we found that the maximum cumulative deformation of the landslide has been >35 m since 1986 with major deformations (>20 m) found after 2020, which may indicate an imminent risk to the Lijie town near the toe of the landslide. With climate change, increased precipitation is expected in future, which may trigger more similar landslides in the vicinity of this region. This work demonstrates an executable framework to assess landslide hazard risk under climate change.