Monitoring and Modelling of Soil–Atmosphere Interaction on a Slope Affected by Shallow Landslides

In order to understand the effect of climatic variables on the hydrological response of a shallow soil and the consequent role of atmospheric features in the triggering mechanism of rainfall-induced landslides, a long-term field monitoring of the wa-ter regime of a slope results very helpful. In this work, field measurements of the soil saturation degree in a sample slope, coming from a 18 months continuous monitoring of soil water content, are presented. The experimental data are com-pared with the seasonal trends of the soil saturation degree resulting from the ap-plication of a simplified empirical model, which is based on rainfall and air tem-perature 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 degree for large scale slope stability analyses.