Influence of the mapping unit for regional landslide early warning systems: comparison between pixels and polygons in Catalonia (NE Spain)

This work presents a prototype landslide early warning system (LEWS) adapted to real-time performance over the region of Catalonia (NE Spain). The system uses high-resolution rainfall information obtained from weather radar observations and susceptibility maps to issue a qualitative warning level at a regional scale. To study the influence of the mapping unit on the LEWS outputs, susceptibility maps obtained for Catalonia based on (i) pixels of different sizes and (ii) hydrological subbasins have been compared. The susceptibility has been derived using a simple fuzzy logic approach combining slope angle and land cover data. The susceptibility maps for the different mapping units have then been employed to run the LEWS for a period of 7 months (warm season of 2010). For each configuration, the performance, interpretability of the warnings, and computational requirements have been compared to assess the suitability of each mapping unit for their use in the LEWS in real time. The configuration using pixels of 30-m resolution as mapping units seems to be the best as a compromise between resolution, performance, and computational cost. However, from an end-user’s real-time perspective, the interpretation of the warnings can be difficult. Therefore, summarizing and visualizing the warnings, which are computed over the high-resolution grid, by subbasins is proposed as the best option.

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