A new early warning criterion for landslides movement assessment: Deformation Standardized Anomaly Index

Numerous engineering case studies suggest that the complexity and oscillatory of landslide displacement types, influenced by diverse deformation patterns, monitoring errors, and varied observation time frames, present challenges for the application of traditional warning criteria in assessing landslide movement in practice. As such, this study attempts to propose a data-dependent early warning criterion through the dimensionless analysis of displacement for two typical landslide displacement patterns: exponential pattern and step-like pattern. The displacement trend in exponential pattern landslides is extracted using the simple moving average (SMA) method, with the onset of acceleration (OOA) determined through the application of the Pettitt test. The Deformation Standardized Anomaly Index (DSAI) is defined to quantitatively evaluate the alert levels corresponding to each monitored displacement data of both patterns. After validating the proposed criterion in ten landslide cases, results indicate that the landslides have a high probability of losing stability when DSAI exceeds four, and the landslide tends to stabilize as DSAI decreases. Compared to displacement speed ratio (DSR), the proposed DSAI is more applicable, aligning with the actual conditions of both landslides with exponential pattern and step-like pattern and exhibiting a relatively low false alarm rate, making it a valuable criterion for landslide early warning.