Hourly or daily rainfall for landslide forecasting?
Leonarduzzi and Molnar in a new paper in NHESS Discussions produced a comprehensive data-driven assessment of the effects of rainfall temporal resolution (hourly versus daily) on landslide prediction performance in Switzerland
In this work we use an extensive landslide inventory with over 3800 events and several daily and hourly, station and gridded rainfall datasets, to explore different scenarios of rainfall threshold estimation. The results show that although hourly rainfall did show best predictive performance for landslides, daily data were not far behind, and the benefits of hourly resolutions can be masked by the higher uncertainties in threshold estimation connected to using short records. The results also show the importance of normalisation and the value of antecedent wetness conditions. Access discussion paper here: external pageNHESS