Mohit Mehendra MISHRA thesis defense - Modeling and information reconstruction from landslide monitoring data

We are proud to anounce the thesis defense of our CDP Risk PhD Students. Mohit will defend his thesis entitled Modeling and information reconstruction from heterogeneous data in the context of gravitational hazards, on Monday, April 25th, 2022 at 9.30am, in GIPSA-lab. Like the 11 thesis of the Cross Disciplinary Programme Risk, his work has been co-directed: GIPSA-Lab, INRAE & ISTerre.

ABSTRACT

Landslide is a gravity-driven downslope movement of soil, debris, or rock near the earth’s surface. It can display heterogeneity in rates and movement types, ranging from creeping motion to catastrophic acceleration. Both scenarios pose a threat to the exposed region’s people, infrastructure, ecosystem, and economy. Traditional landslide risk man- agement strategy suggests avoiding building new infrastructure in such a region based on hazard maps. However, with climate change and rapid urbanization, this strategy seems challenging to implement. Therefore, Early Warning Systems (EWS) are way forward to take timely corrective measures to reduce life and economic losses. These EWS’s rely on landslide monitoring systems, landslide models, and information reconstruction schemes.
In this challenging context of landslide monitoring and forecasting, the present work aims to define a physics-based dynamical model of landslides, unknown parameters identification, and observer-based hazard evaluation from available measurements. This requires a multi-disciplinary approach, i.e., concepts from geophysics on the one hand and control theory on the other hand, for model structure definition and solution methods for observer problems (or parameter identification), respectively. In short, the idea is to analyze the changes in landslide variables and mechanical parameters prior to or while in a motion.