Effective urban landslide hazard assessment
Landslide hazard assessment is a vitally important component of any strategy for the management of risk of instability in hilly areas. Within many urban areas, reactivation of landslides is an important component of risk. Yet, most qualitative approaches do not differentiate between the hazard of individual landslides. Two quantitative approaches are introduced in this paper both of which utilise GISbased accurate maps of geology and landslip as well as a landslide database. The first method is based on historical recurrence of individual landslides. The second method is based on monitoring of subsurface shear movements, and their relationships to rainfall. Both methods can provide reliable information on hazard. Hazard ranking based on the first method has been validated in the Greater Wollongong area of the State of New South Wales in Australia. This paper does not address the potential hazard associated with sites which are recognised to be stable with no known history of instability.
A New Distribution for Extreme Value Analysis
The shape of the commonly used distributions in extreme value analysis is determined by either a specific functional form or a shape parameter. In this paper, we develop a family of distributions which uses two parameters to determine the shape: a balance parameter to control symmetry and a tail order parameter to control the thickness of the tail and modes. Each member in this family has closed forms for its density, cumulative distribution, and quantile function. We discuss the maximum likelihood and minimum distance estimation of the unknown parameters and illustrate the usefulness of the new distribution in extreme value analysis with a real data set.
Geologic proof on paleo-glaciation remains in Laoshan Mountain
Laoshan Mountain is the highest mountain in China coast.Various typical geomorphic features of glarosion,glacial deposition,rare glacial moraine coast and glacial moraine fans in east are well developed in Laoshan Mountain.Well preserved four glacial epochs are identified in Laoshan Mountain.In early Pleistocene,the altitude of snowline ranged from 60 m to 90 m in east.More than sixty paleo-glacial tongues were developed in Laoshan Mountain,some of them which located in east extended into the Yellow Sea.Sporopollen analysis indicates that the climate in Laoshan Mountain is very cold during the ice age.Multi-modal grain-size probability curves of the moraines are the typical characteristics of sediments deposited by glaciation.Regional landforms and climatic conditions are the key factors dominating the altitude of snowline during the ice age.