Adrien Favillier

University of Geneva | UNIGE · Department of Earth Sciences

Large magnitude avalanches (size ≥D3) impact settlements, transportation corridors, and public safety worldwide. In Colorado, United States, avalanches have killed more people than any other natural hazard since 1950. In March 2019, a historically large magnitude avalanche cycle occurred throughout the entire mountainous portion of Colorado resulti...

Snow avalanches pose a constant threat to human lives, property, and infrastructure in mountainous regions worldwide. To efficiently manage avalanche-related hazards and risks, knowledge of past occurrences is crucial. In many mountain regions, archival records on past events are scarce or even completely missing. Therefore, natural archives, such...

One of the purposes of dendrogeomorphic studies is to provide long and continuous reconstructions of mass movements and to detect climate-induced trends in process activity. The development of regional chronologies—in which information from different sites are aggregated—is often needed to identify process–climate relations and to overcome local-sc...

Flood marks and descriptions of past floods in archival records are valuable sources of information to complement the often short and sometimes lacunary-systematic records provided by gauge stations, especially in mountainous and smaller catchments for which the network of recording stations is still fragmentary. Yet, historical accounts of floods...

The primary goal of paleoflood hydrology is to estimate the frequency and magnitude of past floods. Botanical evidence, and particularly scars on trees, has been used repeatedly as paleostage indicators to reconstruct peak discharges and flood height. Yet, these reconstructions depend on the presence of visible scars on tree stems which tend to be...

In China, flash floods are one of the main natural disasters causing loss of life and damage to infrastructure. The threat of flash floods is exacerbated with climate change and increased human activities, such that the number of disasters has shown a clear upward trend in recent years. However, due to the scarcity of instrumental data or overly sh...

Dendrogeomorphic analyses provide long and continuous chronologies of mass movements that are useful for the detection of trends related to climate change. Socio-environmental changes can, however, induce non-stationarities. This study addresses the following questions: (1) How does the evolution of forest cover induce non-stationarities in tree-ri...

Au 20ème siècle, les massifs montagneux, dont les Alpes, ont connu un réchauffement significatif avec une augmentation des températures deux fois plus importante que la moyenne mondiale. Un tel réchauffement altère les composantes de la cryosphère. Elle induit, par exemple, un passage des précipitations solides aux précipitations liquides, des phas...

In the current context of anthropogenic global warming, one of the purposes of dendrogeomorphic analyses is to provide long and continuous chronologies of mass movements, so as to detect potential trends or shift related to increasing temperatures. However, on documented slopes, the comparison between historical archives and tree-ring records sugge...

Expected runout distances and related return periods are the most important parameters needed for zoning in terrain prone to snow avalanching. Hazard mapping procedures usually allocate areas of land to zones with a different degree of danger based on return periods estimated for given snow volumes in the starting zone or with statistical/dynamical...

The purpose of dendrogeomorphic analyses is to amplify the signal related to the geomorphic process under investigation, and to minimize the noise induced by other signals in the tree-ring series. Yet, to date, no study accounts specifically for interferences induced by climate conditions or exogenous disturbances and which can, potentially, affect...

Determination of spatial and temporal patterns of rockfall events remains a serious challenge in most mountain areas and especially when it comes to quantitative hazard assessments, because of the scarcity and incompleteness of long-Term records. his lack of reliable baseline data is particularly problematic in urbanized areas where rockfall risk t...

From a wide variety of maps and iconographic sources, spatially corrected and georeferenced, this work seeks to precisely reconstruct the hydro-morphological changes at the confluence of two main Alpine rivers: Drac and Isère. Multi-centennial knowledge of the morphological evolution this confluence can help in documenting regional climate changes...