In forested, mountain landscapes where debris flows are common, their deposition commonly forms valley-spanning dams of wood, boulders, or complex mixtures of both in headwater valleys. Sediment impoundment behind these dams causes alluviation in what would otherwise be bedrock channels. In this paper, the effects of debris dams on the evolution of headwater valley profiles over geologic time a...

Cellular Automata (CA) are discrete and parallel computational models useful for simulating dynamic systems that evolve on the basis on local interactions. Some natural events, such as some types of landslides, fall into this type of phenomena and lend themselves well to be simulated with this approach. This paper describes the latest version of the SCIDDICA CA family models, specifically devel...

Debris flows consist of a mixture of water and sediments of various sizes. Apart from few exceptions, the water is usually contributed directly from precipitation. In a high mountain environment like the Alps, it appears necessary to consider infiltration of water into the ground during rainfall events, the runoff characteristics and the potential supply of sediment as a function of a multitude...

tion of a tongue-shaped landform located in the Hellas Montes area and summarize morphologically derived evidence that this landform (a) originates at a formerly unknown volcanic edifice located in the north, (b) is probably older than previously assumed, (c) has been resurfaced by subsequent mass-wasting processes taking place ontop of the flow, and (c) shows a substantial degradation morpholo...

We study the Casimir force on a single surface immersed in an inhomoge-neous medium. Specifically we study the vacuum fluctuations of a scalar field with a spatially varying squared mass, m 2 + λ∆(x − a) + V (x), where V is a smooth potential and ∆(x) is a unit-area function sharply peaked around x = 0. ∆(x − a) represents a semi-penetrable thin plate placed at x = a. In the limits {∆(x−a) → δ(...

Recent work has produced a theory for tropical convective available potential energy (CAPE) that highlights the Clausius-Clapeyron (CC) scaling of the atmosphere’s saturation deficit as a driver of increases in CAPE with warming. Here we test this so-called “zero-buoyancy” theory for CAPE by modulating the saturation deficit of cloud-resolving simulations of radiative-convective equilibrium in ...

This paper describes the development of highly accurate adaptive discontinuous Galerkin schemes for the solution of the equations arising from a thin layer type model of debris flows. Such flows have wide applicability in the analysis of avalanches induced by many natural calamities, e.g. volcanoes, earthquakes, etc. These schemes are coupled with special parallel solution methodologies to prod...

On 15–16 December 1999, heavy rainfall severely stroke Campania region (southern Italy), triggering numerous debris flows on the slopes of the San Martino Valle Caudina-Cervinara area. Soil slips originated within the weathered volcaniclastic mantle of soil cover overlying the carbonate skeleton of the massif. Debris slides turned into fast flowing mixtures of matrix and large blocks, downslope...

Non-homogeneous debris flows generally occur during the rainy seasons in Southwest China, and have received considerable attention in the literature. Regarding the complexity in debris flow dynamics, experimental approaches have proven to be effective in revealing the formative mechanism for debris flow, and quantifying the relations between the various influencing factors with debris-flow form...

Debris-flow volume is fundamental to mobility, yet many debris flows change as they travel. Growth can occur through diverse processes such channel-bed entrainment, bank failures, aggregation of landslides, and coalescence multiple flows. Integrating growth, either over upslope area or stream length, combines the effects these growth requires specification only zone extent a factor. To delineat...