Hui Tang

• PhD
• Group Leader at GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences

The advent of machine learning has significantly improved the accuracy of identifying mass movements through the seismic waves they generate, making it possible to implement real‐time early warning systems for debris flows. However, we lack a profound understanding of the effective seismic features and the limitations of different machine learning...

The study of mechanisms of debris-flow formation and movement is constrained by the lack of comprehensive and long-term field monitoring data. In 1961, the Dongchuan Debris Flow Observation and Research Station (DDFORS) was established in the highly active debris-flow catchment of Jiangjia Ravine to conduct continuous field observations of debris f...

To manage debris flows, it is critical to both recognize potential impact mechanisms and evaluate, via physical models, associated impact forces. Seismic signals can be used to detect flows and infer flow properties, but inferring flow characteristics in channels with check dams and upslope deposits remains challenging. In this study, we conducted...

Landslides, debris flows, hyperconcentrated flows, and floods are among the most dangerous natural hazards worldwide. One of the fundamental tasks for geomorphologists is to classify and identify the kinds of processes they observe in the field. The task is more challenging than it sounds, especially considering high-damage processes like debris fl...

Mountain Hazards and Engineering Resilience, China (zhangbinlan24@mails.ucas.ac.cn) Machine learning techniques have been extensively applied to identify debris flow events in seismic signals and develop debris-flow early warning systems. However, several challenges persist. Traditional models find it difficult to directly process the raw waveform...

Enhancing real-time detection of mass movement events is critical for improving early warning systems and reducing risks to individuals and communities. Seismic monitoring offers an effective tool for hazard detection and timely alerts. However, a significant challenge remains in successfully isolating seismic signals associated with mass movements...

Granular flows, such as landslides and rock avalanches, are a prevalent geological hazard in mountainous regions, necessitating accurate dynamic modeling for disaster prevention. We investigate the influence of particle composition and flow regimes on granular flow dynamics and seismic response through a series of flume experiments. By varying part...

Both glaciers and debris flows can shape the landscape in high mountain areas close to drainage divides. As the glacier erodes the landscape, it leads to drainage divide migration and an asymmetric landscape. During divide migration, catastrophic mass movement events, such as rock avalanches and debris flows, may intensify. The intensive erosion ab...

The ability of seismic instruments to monitor catastrophic channelized flows (e.g., bedload transport, debris flows, glacial lake outburst floods, and lahars) is becoming of interest to scientists and practitioners. However, using debris flows as an example, the variability in catchment geology, event properties, and seismic instrument configuratio...

Debris flows are fast‐flowing, high‐energy mixtures of sediment and water that are difficult to monitor. Seismic monitoring instruments can be placed safely outside the channel, but it is an indirect method that needs the application of theory‐based inversion to obtain quantitative information on flow properties and rheology. Such inversion methods...

Debris flows triggered by rainfall are among the world’s most dangerous natural hazards due to their abrupt onset, rapid movement, and large boulder loads that can cause significant loss of life and infrastructure. Monitoring and early warning are key strategies for mitigating debris flows. However, deploying large instruments for continuous monito...

Seismic instruments placed outside of spatially extensive hazard zones can be used to rapidly sense a range of mass movements. However, it remains challenging to automatically detect specific events of interest. Benford's law, which states that the first non‐zero digit of given data sets follows a specific probability distribution, can provide a co...

With increasing glacial hazards due to global climate warming, a promising digital-twin-based platform has been proposed for early warning of cryospheric disasters.

Bedload transport is a natural process that strongly affects the Earth's surface system. An important component of quantifying bedload transport flux and establishing early warning systems is the identification of the onset of bedload motion. Bedload transport can be monitored with high temporal resolution using passive acoustic methods, for exampl...

The 2015 Illapel earthquake (Mw 8.3) generated a tsunami that significantly impacted the central-north Chilean coast. Previous studies have utilized numerical modelling to analyse this tsunami propagation, yet none have applied a comparative forward and inverse modelling approach to accurately estimate the earthquake source parameters, flow charact...

Rapid climate change is triggering an increase in the frequency and magnitude of catastrophic mass movements on the Earth's surface. Real-time detection of these hazards can improve existing early warning systems and mitigate risks to both humans and society. However, effectively isolating seismic signals from mass movements within continuous seism...

Debris flows as fast-moving and water-saturated sediment masses are particularly hazardous in alpine areas due to their high destructive power and poor predictability. We still do not fully know under what conditions debris flows occur and how to predict them. The most common method for predicting debris flow in warning systems and hazard assessmen...

Machine learning can improve the accuracy of detecting mass movements in seismic signals and extend early warning times. However, we lack a profound understanding of the limitations of different machine learning methods and the most effective seismic features especially for the identifcation of debris flows. This contribution explores the importanc...

Debris flow can cause severe damage due to its high velocity, large volume, and long transport distance. The monitoring and early warning system is one of the key approaches in debris-flow hazard mitigation. Monitoring and early warning equipment are easily damaged by debris flows, which directly affects the monitoring system. In recent years, envi...

During rockfall events, the seismic waves are generated in response to the time-varying normal and tangential forces between the Earth and colliding and sliding mass. These forces carry information about the nature of the generative seismic source; hence, the source dynamics can be estimated. Several studies have used forward modeling to determine...

Debris flow is an important process that shapes steep landscapes, connecting the hillslopes and fluvial domains. Yet, it is unclear how debris flows quantitatively influence the topography. Here, we propose and develop a new framework considering debris flows as stochastic processes in long-term landscape evolution. We assume that debris flows occu...

Drainage basins delineate Earth's land surface into individual water collection units. Basin shape and river sinuosity determine water and sediment dynamics, affecting landscape evolution and connectivity between ecosystems and freshwater species. However, a high-resolution global dataset for the boundaries and geometry of basins is still missing....

Drainage divides separate Earth’s surface into individual river basins. Divide migration impacts the evolution of landforms, regional climate, ecosystems and biodiversity. In this Review, we assess the processes and dynamics of divide migration and offer insights into the impact on climate and biodiversity. Drainage divides are not static: they can...

An important component of quantifying bedload transport flux is the identification of the onset of bedload motion. Bedload transport can be monitored with high temporal resolution using passive acoustic methods, e.g., hydrophones. Yet, an efficient method for identifying the onset of bedload transport from long-term continuous acoustic data is stil...

Debris flows are among the most dangerous natural hazards worldwide because they start abruptly, move quickly, and transport large boulders, causing great loss of life and infrastructure. The most important approach to preventing and mitigating debris flows is through monitoring and early warning. In recent years, environmental seismology has emerg...

Drainage basins delineate the Earth’s land surface into individual water collection units. Basin shape and river sinuosity determine water and sediment dynamics, affecting landscape evolution and connectivity between ecosystems and freshwater species. However, a high-resolution global dataset for the boundaries and geometry of basins is still missi...

Solid-fluid interaction vitally influences the flow dynamics of particles in a geophysical flow. A coupled computational fluid dynamics and discrete element method (CFD-DEM) is used in this study to model multiphase geophysical flow as a mixture of fluid and solid phases. The two non-Newtonian fluids (i.e., Bingham and Hershcel-Bulkley fluids) and...

Runoff-generated debris flows are a common post-fire hazard in the western United States and a growing number of regions around the world. As wildfire continues to emerge across a broader range of geographic regions and plant communities, there is an increasing need for generalizable methods to predict post-fire debris-flow initiation. The predicti...

The first step in building an early warning system using seismic signals is to automatically identify events of interest. Here, the first digit distribution of seismic signals generated by debris flows and other surface processes was calculated to validate compliance with Benford's law (BL). A detector model for debris flow events was introduced ba...

Runoff-generated debris flows are common hazards in mountainous regions, causing millions of dollars lost and hundreds of casualties yearly. Early warning systems based on rainfall thresholds have been implemented to reduce the impact of these hazards. These thresholds tend to be based on short monitoring periods, which cannot fully capture the var...

Seismic instruments placed outside of spatially extensive hazard zones can be used to rapidly sense a range of mass movements. However, it remains challenging to automatically detect specific events of interest. Benford’s law, which states that first non-zero-digit of given datasets follow a specific probability distribution, can provide a computat...

Understanding the impact forces exerted by debris flows is limited by a lack of direct field measurements and validated numerical models. In this study, we use real‐time impact‐force measurements and field observations of debris flows recorded by a sensor network in Jiangjia Ravine, China, to quantify the impact‐force distribution of natural debris...

Outburst floods generated by dam breaches associated with debris flow may have long-lasting effects on the formation and development landscape and the safety of human beings, increasing the difficulty of disaster prevention and mitigation. However, little was considered about channel aggradation contributing downstream damage of outburst flood. The...

Extreme rainfall events in mountainous environments usually induce significant sediment runoff or mass movements—debris flows, hyperconcentrated flows and stream flows—that pose substantial threats to human life and infrastructure. However, understanding of the sediment transport mechanisms that control these torrent processes remains incomplete du...

Plain Language Summary Landslides belong to a type of earth surface process recognized by their high damage potential. Computer models can simulate the landslides' movement to predict speed, forces, and deposition, which can help to delineate areas at risk and to design mitigation measures. We simulated the 2018 Baige landslide in China with a meth...

Overtopping flows in landslide dams erode and entrain materials on the dam surface resulting in erosional features that undermine the dam stability and facilitate the subsequent outburst flooding. A comprehensive understanding of dam surface evolution is therefore crucial for flood risk assessment and hazard mitigation. In this research, we study t...

During an earthquake sequence, there are often multiple recurring landslides. Understanding the spatial distribution of the landslides triggered by the first earthquake can help us predict the landslide susceptibility for subsequent shakes over a short term. This study used two landslide inventories from the Lombok earthquake sequence in Indonesia...

Drainage channels are widely used for discharging debris flows into deposition basins or rivers. However, the current drainage channel designs for guiding rapid debris flows downstream do not account for the variations of the gullies’ gradient and debris flow energy. In this study, we evaluated the performance of different step-baffle geometries (s...

Landslide dams form when landslide materials reach rivers causing complete or partial blockage. It is known that overtopping water flows and seepage flows are two crucial processes that induce dam failure. In several instances, the landslide dams collapse is caused by the coupled influence of seepage flows and overtopping water. This study aims to...

Glacier lake outburst floods (GLOFs) that result from the breaching of moraine dams are typical disasters in high mountain regions of the Tibetan Plateau, which endanger vital infrastructures such as the Sichuan-Tibet Railway and Highway. Breaching can be caused by tsunami-type waves, resulting from glaciers calving and falling into impounded lakes...

During an earthquake sequence, there are often multiple recurring landslides. Understanding the spatial distribution of the landslides triggered by the first earthquake can help us predict the landslide susceptibility for subsequent shakes over a short term. This study used two landslide inventories from the Lombok earthquake sequence in Indonesia...

Lagrangian particle-based smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) is increasingly widely used in landslide modelling. This paper investigates four important issues not addressed by previous studies on SPH modelling of large-scale landslides, i.e., convergence property, influence of constitutive parameters, scale effect and friction reduction, and inf...

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Following extremely heavy rainfall, a catastrophic land- slide occurred in Mazhe Village, Enshi, China, on 21 July 2020. In this study, we use C-band Sentinel-1A Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) measurements and Sentinel-2 optical imagery to retrieve the ground deformation evolution before this landslide and the aftermath. Optical i...

On September 16, 2015, a Mw 8.3 earthquake struck the north-central Chile coast, triggering a tsunami observed along 500 km of coastline, between Huasco (28.5°S) and San Antonio (33.5°S). This tsunami provided a unique opportunity to examine the nature of tsunami deposits in a semi-arid, siliciclastic environment where stratigraphic and sedimentolo...

Landslide dam failures have devastating capability to cause significant hazards to human lives and infrastructure along their flooding paths. Recent studies have explored such hazards based on environmental seismology to analyze the process of evolution using the time-frequency characteristics of seismic signals. However, most research has focused...

The extreme heat from wildfire alters soil properties and incinerates vegetation, leading to changes in infiltration capacity, ground cover, soil erodibility, and rainfall interception. These changes promote elevated rates of runoff and sediment transport that increase the likelihood of runoff-generated debris flows. Debris flows are most common in...

In the semiarid Southwestern USA, wildfires are commonly followed by runoff-generated debris flows because wildfires remove vegetation and ground cover, which reduces soil infiltration capacity and increases soil erodibility. At a study site in Southern California, we initially observed runoff-generated debris flows in the first year following fire...

Rainfall intensity-duration (ID) thresholds are commonly used to assess the potential for runoff-generated debris flows, but the sensitivity of these thresholds to sediment supply, which can change rapidly with time, is relatively unexplored. Furthermore, debris flows often self-organize into distinct surges but the factors controlling the magnitud...

Sediments provide information on parameters governing their deposition. However, this information gets blurred by post-depositional processes. Here, we document post-depositional alteration processes that affected an onshore tsunami deposit from its deposition in February 2010 until 2014. Post-depositional changes proceeded in three stages. First,...

Runoff in steep channels is capable of transitioning into debris flows with hazardous implications for downstream communities and infrastructure, particularly in alpine landscapes with minimal vegetation and areas recently disturbed by wildfire. Here, we derive thresholds for the initiation of runoff‐generated debris flows based on critical values...

Wildfire alters vegetation cover and soil hydrologic properties, substantially increasing the likelihood of debris flows in steep watersheds. Our understanding of initiation mechanisms of postwildfire debris flows is limited, in part, by a lack of direct observations and measurements. In particular, there is a need to understand temporal variations...

Debris flows are a common hazard in steep, recently burned terrain. Rainfall intensity-duration (ID) thresholds, which are often derived for a specific geographic region, are commonly used to assess the likelihood of postfire debris flows. However, traditional methods for estimating rainfall ID thresholds require historical data that quantify the r...

The Martian outflow channels comprise some of the largest known channels in the Solar System. Remote-sensing investigations indicate that cataclysmic floods likely excavated the channels ~3.4 Ga. Previous studies show that, in the southern circum-Chryse region, their flooding pathways include hundreds of kilometers of channel floors with upward gra...

Glacial retreat in recent decades has exposed unstable slopes and allowed deep water to extend beneath some of those slopes. Slope failure at the terminus of Tyndall Glacier on 17 October 2015 sent 180 million tons of rock into Taan Fiord, Alaska. The resulting tsunami reached elevations as high as 193 m, one of the highest tsunami runups ever docu...

Physics-informed machine learning approach for predicting post-fire debris flows based on thresholds Post-fire debris flow is a common hazard in the western United States. However, after decades of efforts in the debris flow research community, universally applicable post-fire debris flow predict methods are still lacking. Large discrepancies in th...

Wave set-up steepened and accentuated the storm surge during Typhoon Haiyan in November 2013 resulting in bore-like flooding with surge heights of 7 m and flow velocities reaching 5 m s− 1 on the open-sea coastal plain near Hernani. This study investigates two distinct sediment assemblages left behind by the coastal flooding associated with this su...

Flood hazards caused by tsunamis can cause enormous amounts of casualties and property losses. However, these hazards often occur at unexpected locations, which poses challenges for direct observations of flood source characteristics (e.g. flow speed and water depth in tsunamis-induced inundations). For this reason, inverse modelling methods based...

Tsunami deposits from paleo-events contained a wealth of information about paleo-tsunamis. The decryptions of this information become extremely important when quantifiable observations were not available. Tsunami deposit can be eroded and transported from both marine and terrestrial environment. An interesting question will be how marine-terrestria...

Deciphering quantitative information from tsunami deposits is especially important for analyzing paleotsunami events in which deposits comprise one of the leftover physical evidences. The physical meaning of the deciphered quantities depends on the physical assumptions that are applied. The aim of our study is to estimate the characteristics of tsu...

GeoClaw-STRICHE is designed for simulating the physical impacts of tsunami as it relates to erosion, transport and deposition. GeoClaw-STRICHE comprises of three components: (1) nonlinear shallow water equations; (2) advection-diffusion equation; (3) an equation for morphology updating. Multiple grain sizes and sediment layers are added into GeoCla...

Tsunami deposits are recordings of tsunami events that contain information about flow conditions. Deciphering quantitative information from tsunami deposits is especially important for analyzing paleo-tsunami events in which deposits comprise the only leftover physical evidence. The physical meaning of the deciphered quantities depends on the physi...

Modern tsunami deposits are employed to estimate the overland flow characteristics of tsunamis. With the help of the overland-flow characteristics, the characteristics of the causative tsunami wave can be estimated. The understanding of tsunami deposits has tremendously improved over the last decades. There are three prominent inversion models: Moo...

Based on the study of hydrothermal experiment on the interaction between the K-feldspar, plagioclase and CO2 fluids at different temperature(100°C, 200°C and 300°C), it is suggested that the corrosion intensity of feldspar should gradually be enhanced as the temperature increases, and albite is stronger than the corrosion degree of K-feldspar. Afte...