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Estimation of rainfall intensity-duration thresholds, used for the identification of debris flow/landslide triggering rainfall events, has been traditionally based on raingauge observations. The main drawback of using information from gauges is that the measurement stations are usually located far away from the debris flow initiation areas. In complex terrain where debris flows take place, the spatial variability of rainfall can be very high and this translates in large uncertainty of raingauge-based estimates of debris flow triggering rainfall. This work focuses on the assessment of the impact of rainfall estimation uncertainty on identification and use of rainfall thresholds for debris flow occurrence. The Upper Adige River basin, Northern Italy, is the area of study. A detailed database of more than 400 identified debris flow initiation points during the period 2000-2010 and a raingauge network of 100 stations comprise the database used for this work. The methodology examines the intensity-duration thresholds derived from a set of raingauges that are assumed to be located at debris flow initiation points (DFRs) and an equivalent set of raingauges assumed to have the role of the closest (to debris flow) available measurement (MRs). A set of reference rainfall thresholds is used to identify the rainfall events at DFRs that "triggered" debris flows (i.e. exceed the threshold). For these same events, the corresponding rainfall thresholds are derived from MR observations. Comparison between the rainfall thresholds derived from DFRs and MRs revealed that uncertainty in rainfall estimation has a major impact on estimated intensity-duration thresholds. Specifically, the results showed that thresholds estimated from MR observations are consistently underestimated. Evaluation of the estimated thresholds for warning procedures showed that while detection is high, the main issue is the high false alarm ratio, which limits the overall accuracy of the procedure. Overall performance on debris flow prediction was shown to be good for low rainfall thresholds and poor for high rainfall thresholds examined. Lastly, it was found that filtering out rainfall events with duration <12h may improve bias in estimated thresholds and performance for high rainfall thresholds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to the vital role of geomorphological analysis in natural hazards study, geomorphology, distributed hydrology and other related disciplines, we present the first global basin morphometric product of 30 characteristics, 9 archived elementary including stream order, stream number, stream length, basin relief, basin length, basin perimeter, maximal flow length, down valley length and overland flow length, and 21 derivable from these elementary morphometric characteristics. Characteristics of basins discharging to every grid-cell of the global earth surface are generated at 30 arcsec resolution from the remotely sensed HydroSHEDS dataset. This product does not exist in previous literature because tree-structural grid-cells bring large computational redundancy to basin delineation and thus computing basin characteristics. To generate this product within a reasonable timeframe, we introduce in this paper an efficient framework to reduce the algorithm complexity to linear, O( N ). We have presented a few geomorphologic findings using the generated product. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]