Long abstract:

Landslide is a complex naturally occurring phenomenon involving the downslope movement of surface material under gravity, which affects 12.6% of India’s total land area, excluding snow-covered areas, mostly in the Himalayas, the Western Ghats, the Eastern Ghats, the Northeastern hill ranges, and the Nilgiris. Modern-day satellites with rapid image acquisition cycles allow for near-real-time imaging of hazards-affected areas, which helps in studying the spatial extent of the events. Publicly accessible multi-spectral datasets derived from earth observation images can be used in analyzing manual or automated landslide detection. In the present study, high-resolution multi-temporal images were used in landslide detection of different parts of Western Himalayan regions, showing the evident signature of slope failures a few years before the occurrence of the actual events. This paper includes three different landslide events; the landslide near Chenab River on 13 August 2021, the rockfall from the Ronti Glacier on 7 February 2021, and the Urni landslide in June 2016. The result from the above studies shows that any landslide event shows clear signatures of slope failures before a few days to a few years of the actual occurrence of the event. Therefore, this paper emphasizes on the monitoring of such vulnerable areas based on high-resolution time series satellite images which are available on regular basis to avoid the loss of human lives in the future.