Geostatistical Integration of Different Sources of Elevation and its Effect on Landslide Hazard Mapping

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to compare the prediction performances of different landslide hazard maps based on topographic data stemming from different sources of elevation. The geostatistical framework of kriging, which can properly integrate spatial data with different accuracy, is applied for generating more reliable elevation estimates from both sparse elevation spot heights and exhaustive ASTER-based elevation values. A case study from Boeun, Korea illustrates that the integration of elevation and slope maps derived from different data yielded different prediction performances for landslide hazard mapping. The landslide hazard map constructed by using the elevation and the associated slope maps based on geostatistical integration of spot heights and ASTER-based elevation resulted in the best prediction performance. Landslide hazard mapping using elevation and slope maps derived from the interpolation of only sparse spot heights showed the worst prediction performance