Earthquake risk assessment using GIS based landslide susceptibility model
Student name: Ms Aastha Sharma
Guide: Dr Chander Kumar Singh
Year of completion: 2013
Host Organisation: ESRI India
Supervisor (Host Organisation): Dr Oinam Bakimchandra
Abstract: Natural hazards like earthquakes can cause a lot of destruction and the complexity of an earthquake
fault makes quake prediction difficult. This study tries to establish a relationship between landslides
and earthquakes and tries to see how much impact do landslide have on earthquakes. A landslide
susceptibility model was run on three different levels (country, state and district/tehsil). For this
study12 parameters were considered viz. elevation, slope, aspect, curvature, distance to roads, land
use/land cover, distance to river, topographical wetness index (TWI), stream transport index (STI),
stream power index (STI), distance to faults and lithology. The use of analytical hierarchy process
(AHP) was done to find out weightages that could be given to each parameter for the spatial multicriteria
evaluation (SMCE), which was used to create the landslide susceptibility map. For the first
level of evaluations GTOPO30 digital elevation model(DEM) of 30 arc second(1km) resolution was
used. The second level of evaluations were done using SRTM DEM with resolution 3 arc
second(90m). And the third level of evaluations were done with the use of ASTER DEM with
resolution 1 arc second(30m). From the results it was observed that SMCE yielded better results at
second and third level as compared to the first one, in the terms that the demarcations of different
susceptibility zones were more prominent in second and third level analysis. Earthquake records of
the last 30 years and landslide susceptibility maps were used to observe how much earthquakes and
landslides are related. It was observed the a few areas which fell in the high landslide susceptibility
zone had a past record of high intensity(above 6 on Richter Scale) earthquakes.
Keywords: Earthquake, Landslide Susceptibility, DEM, AHP, SMCE
