Monitoring and modelling of soil–atmosphere interaction on a slope affected by shallow landslides

A long-term field monitoring proves very helpful to understand the effect of climatic variables on the hydrological response of a shallow soil and the role of atmospheric features in the triggering mechanism of rainfall-induced landslides. In this work, field measurements of the soil saturation in a sample slope, coming from 18 months continuous monitoring of soil water content, are presented. The experimental data are compared with the seasonal trends of the soil saturation resulting from the application of a simplified empirical model, based on rainfall and air temperature input data. The performance of the model is evaluated for two different soil depths, in order to establish a future application of this method to predict time trends of the saturation for large scale slope stability analyses.