Comparison of shallow landslide stability models through laboratory simulations

Shallow mass movements represent a significant portion within the vast family of landslide phenomena. Moreover, their detection, monitoring and stability analysis is not an easy task. Analytical stability models are often used for the purpose. Their formulation ranges from extremely simple ones to rather complex formulations which include a number of physical parameters intrinsic to the terrain as well as external forcing agents. The application of such models seems to be strictly site-specific as various authors calibrate their use to a particular case study under investigation. In this work we propose a comparison on the application of several models for shallow mass movement stability analysis. Even though their formulation is similar, the significance of the governing parameter in each model varies and thus application of those models on the same case study leads to greatly varying results. The analytical models have been testes at the laboratory scale under several types of shallow landslide simulations. The obtained results indicate that often simpler models are able to successfully predict instability conditions in terms of factor of safety. On the other hand, a variation of the homogeneity of the terrain poses a series of difficulties in the implementation of a given model. Therefore, a discussion on the applicability of such models on real case studies is proposed, which highlights the limits of their reliability.