Articles | Volume 17, issue 3
https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-17-467-2017
https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-17-467-2017
Research article
 | 
22 Mar 2017
Research article |  | 22 Mar 2017

Landslides, floods and sinkholes in a karst environment: the 1–6 September 2014 Gargano event, southern Italy

Maria Elena Martinotti, Luca Pisano, Ivan Marchesini, Mauro Rossi, Silvia Peruccacci, Maria Teresa Brunetti, Massimo Melillo, Giuseppe Amoruso, Pierluigi Loiacono, Carmela Vennari, Giovanna Vessia, Maria Trabace, Mario Parise, and Fausto Guzzetti

Abstract. In karst environments, heavy rainfall is known to cause multiple geohydrological hazards, including inundations, flash floods, landslides and sinkholes. We studied a period of intense rainfall from 1 to 6 September 2014 in the Gargano Promontory, a karst area in Puglia, southern Italy. In the period, a sequence of torrential rainfall events caused severe damage and claimed two fatalities. The amount and accuracy of the geographical and temporal information varied for the different hazards. The temporal information was most accurate for the inundation caused by a major river, less accurate for flash floods caused by minor torrents and even less accurate for landslides. For sinkholes, only generic information on the period of occurrence of the failures was available. Our analysis revealed that in the promontory, rainfall-driven hazards occurred in response to extreme meteorological conditions and that the karst landscape responded to the torrential rainfall with a threshold behaviour. We exploited the rainfall and the landslide information to design the new ensemble–non-exceedance probability (E-NEP) algorithm for the quantitative evaluation of the possible occurrence of rainfall-induced landslides and of related geohydrological hazards. The ensemble of the metrics produced by the E-NEP algorithm provided better diagnostics than the single metrics often used for landslide forecasting, including rainfall duration, cumulated rainfall and rainfall intensity. We expect that the E-NEP algorithm will be useful for landslide early warning in karst areas and in other similar environments. We acknowledge that further tests are needed to evaluate the algorithm in different meteorological, geological and physiographical settings.

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Short summary
We studied a period of torrential rain between 1 and 6 September 2014 in the Gargano Promontory, Puglia, southern Italy, which caused a variety of geohydrological hazards, including landslides, flash floods, inundations and sinkholes. We used the rainfall and the landslide information available to us to design and test the new ensemble – non-exceedance probability (E-NEP) algorithm for the quantitative evaluation of the probability of the occurrence of rainfall-induced landslides.
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