Monitoring and analysis of geological hazards in Three Gorges area based on load impact change.

Geological hazard monitoring is essential to the prevention and control of geological hazards, yet conventional monitoring is often conducted for local geological hazards, and the relation between monitored results and geological hazards remains poorly understood. In this study, a regional load deformation field model was constructed using data from 26 Continuously Operating Reference Stations (CORS) and 8 gravity stations in the Three Gorges area. The relation between load-induced changes and geological hazards, as the regular characteristics (RCS) in this paper, is obtained by comparing the geological hazards with the impact of the total load change in the whole region of the Three Gorges area and the entire process from 2011 to the beginning of 2015. Geological hazards are more prone to occurring when there are one or more RCS, especially abnormal dynamic environment appears at the same time, such as solid high tide and heavy rainfall. The RCS included the ground geodesy height change rate increasing, the ground gravity change rate decreasing, the ground vertical deviation diverging, the ground geodesy height gradient growing larger and the ground gravity gradient growing larger. Using all of the 18 geological hazards from May to July 2013 to verify the RCS, it was found that the comprehensive observations of CORS and gravity stations can effectively monitor the RCS of the load-induced changes. The results of this study provide more insights associated with the geological hazards monitoring and analysis methods as well as effective support for geological hazard forecasting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]