Landslide thickness estimation
Landslides are a major natural hazard that threaten infrastructure, human lives, and property worldwide. A key quantity in characterizing landslide behavior is the failure surface—its depth, shape, and orientation. Knowledge of this hidden interface is crucial for slope stability analysis, risk assessment, and the design of effective remedial measures.
My PhD research addresses this challenge as an inverse problem: given topographic and observational data, how can we reconstruct the subsurface geometry of landslides? I develop and apply PDE-constrained optimization, regularization techniques, and numerical simulations to infer the slip surface and estimate thickness. This framework provides a mathematically rigorous approach to extract quantities that are traditionally inaccessible to field surveys, supporting both detailed case studies and regional-scale hazard analysis.
