Advances in the simulation of debris flow erosion: The case study of the Rio Gere (Italy) event of the 4th August 2017

Debris flows are natural hazards causing fatalities and damages to infrastructures every year. One of the current challenges is to improve the predictability of such events using simulation tools. In this direction, the paper aims to model debris-flow generation starting from the water component and then simulating the motion of the bulked solid-fluid mixture mass flow. The debris component is progressively increased through entrainment of the channel bed material. The simulation has been performed exploiting the tool r.avaflow, which implements a physically-based model (Pudasaini and Mergili, 2019) for the flow propagation and an empirical multi-phase model for the entrainment processes. The investigated study case occurred in the Northeastern Alps of Italy, near the town of Cortina d'Ampezzo (Veneto Region), during the summer of 2017. The debris flow was triggered by a heavy rainstorm that caused extreme surface runoff, leading to entrainment of sediment from the channel bed. The debris flow obstructed the bridge of a regional road and consequently flooded the adjacent areas. Different types of debris flow simulations are performed, testing four specific functions to compute the entrain-ment rate. The simulated results are then compared against field observations. The analysis considers the differ-ences in volume and depth of entrainment and in the output hydrograph. We conclude that entrainment is correlated with the terrain slope, particularly if it is calculated on a smoothed digital elevation model, which dilutes a less significant local steepness. We calibrate a spatially distributed slope-dependent erosion coefficient that successfully reproduced the observed entrainment volumes. The out-comes highlight the great importance of simulating debris flow entrainment processes adopting a multiphase model, which resulted particularly suitable for an accurate reproduction of the investigated event. The results, corroborated by further verifications, can improve the reliability of challenging predictive simulations on debris flow erosion. (c) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Automated summary

The study focuses on modeling the process of debris flow generation and simulating the motion of solid-fluid mixture mass flow by progressively increasing the debris component. The research case occurred in the Northeastern Alps of Italy, and the results suggest that simulating debris flow entrainment processes using a multiphase model is particularly suitable for accurately reproducing the event.