iHydroSlide3D v1.0: an advanced hydrological–geotechnical model for hydrological simulation and three-dimensional landslide prediction

Abstract

Forecasting flood–landslide cascading disasters in flood- and landslide-prone regions is an important topic within the scientific community. Existing hydrological–geotechnical models mainly employ infinite or static 3D stability models, and very few models have incorporated the 3D landslide model into a distributed hydrological model. In this work, we modified a 3D landslide model to account for slope stability under various soil wetness states and then coupled it with the Coupled Routing and Excess STorage (CREST) distributed hydrology model, forming a new modeling system called iHydroSlide3D v1.0. Through embedding a soil moisture downscaling method, this model is able to model hydrological and slope-stability submodules even at different resolutions. For a large-scale application, we paralleled the code and elaborated several computational strategies. The model produces a relatively comprehensive and reliable diagnosis for flood–landslide events, including (i) complete hydrological components (e.g., soil moisture and streamflow), (ii) a landslide susceptibility assessment (factor of safety and probability of occurrence), and (iii) a landslide hazard analysis (geometric properties of potential failures). We evaluated the plausibility of the model by testing it in a large and complex geographical area, the Yuehe River basin, China, where we attempted to reproduce cascading flood–landslide events. The results are well verified at both hydrological and geotechnical levels. iHydroSlide3D v1.0 is therefore appropriately used as an innovative tool for assessing and predicting cascading flood–landslide events once the model is well calibrated.