Preliminary Modeling of Rockfall Runout: Definition of the Input Parameters for the QGIS Plugin QPROTO
Department of Structural, Building and Geotechnical Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, c.so Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Turin, Italy
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Academic Editors: Didier Hantz and Jesus Martinez-Frias
Geosciences 2021, 11(2), 88; https://doi.org/10.3390/geosciences11020088
Received: 17 January 2021 / Revised: 7 February 2021 / Accepted: 10 February 2021 / Published: 14 February 2021
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Rock Fall Hazard and Risk Assessment)
The identification of the most rockfall-prone areas is the first step of the risk assessment procedure. In the case of land and urban planning, hazard and risk analyses involve large portions of territory, and thus, preliminary methods are preferred to define specific zones where more detailed computations are needed. To reach this goal, the QGIS-based plugin QPROTO was developed, able to quantitatively compute rockfall time-independent hazard over a three-dimensional topography on the basis of the Cone Method. This is obtained by combining kinetic energy, passing frequency and detachment propensity of each rockfall source. QPROTO requires the definition of few angles (i.e., the energy angle and the lateral angle ) that should take into account all the phenomena occurring during the complex block movement along the slope. The outputs of the plugin are a series of raster maps reporting the invasion zones and the quantification of both the susceptibility and the hazard. In this paper, a method to relate these angles to some characteristics of the block (volume and shape) and the slope (inclination, forest density) is proposed, to provide QPROTO users with a tool for estimating the input parameters. The results are validated on a series of case studies belonging to the north-western Italian Alps.
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Keywords:
rockfall hazard; rockfall runout; QGIS; QPROTO; cone method
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MDPI and ACS Style
Castelli, M.; Torsello, G.; Vallero, G. Preliminary Modeling of Rockfall Runout: Definition of the Input Parameters for the QGIS Plugin QPROTO. Geosciences 2021, 11, 88. https://doi.org/10.3390/geosciences11020088
AMA Style
Castelli M, Torsello G, Vallero G. Preliminary Modeling of Rockfall Runout: Definition of the Input Parameters for the QGIS Plugin QPROTO. Geosciences. 2021; 11(2):88. https://doi.org/10.3390/geosciences11020088
Chicago/Turabian StyleCastelli, Marta; Torsello, Giulia; Vallero, Gianmarco. 2021. "Preliminary Modeling of Rockfall Runout: Definition of the Input Parameters for the QGIS Plugin QPROTO" Geosciences 11, no. 2: 88. https://doi.org/10.3390/geosciences11020088
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