Brief Description:

Accurately capturing rainfall, especially in mountainous terrain and during extreme events, remains challenging, making it essential to understand how variations in storm time series (e.g., peak intensity, duration, and pattern) influence slope stability predictions. 

We applied CRISIS model to six storm events, with the same total rainfall, differing in peak intensity, duration, and temporal pattern (uniform vs Gaussian distribution).

Key Takeaways:

• Predicted failures are highly sensitive to storm time series, accurate and high-quality rainfall data is crucial; without it, even the most advanced mechanistic models can produce unreliable results.

• Under wet initial conditions, short, intense storms, where the peak rainfall intensity exceeded the surface's infiltration capacity primarily triggered deeper bottom-up failures on slopes with initially shallow groundwater tables, while longer, less intense storms caused both bottom-up and top-down failures. This pattern arises because excess rainfall during short, intense storms runs off rather than infiltrating, limiting pore pressure buildup. As a result, only slopes at valley bottoms (already near failure due to shallow water tables) were triggered.

• Under drier initial conditions with a deeper water table, short, intense storms mainly triggered top-down failures, whereas long, less intense storms triggered both.