A new paper recently published on Procedia Earth and Planetary Science (among the authors, the CMCC researcher G. Rianna) investigates the hydrological behavior of silty volcanic soils through experiments carried out by physical models. Particular emphasis is placed in characterizing the lowermost and uppermost boundary conditions acting on a shallow pyroclastic cover, by investigating, respectively, the possible capillary barrier effects and the soil-atmosphere interaction.
The work shows how the developed physical models feature the hydrological behavior of a silty pyroclastic layer under various meteorological forcing, that is total precipitation and potential evaporation, allowing to build up frameworks useful to characterize the main factors inducing landslides.

The abstract of the paper:

The work investigates experimentally the hydrological response of a volcanic silty-sand involved in the Nocera Inferiore flowslide occurred in 2005. To this aim, an infiltration column and a lisimeter have been developed. In both, the same volcanic silty-sand soil has been placed through the pluvial deposition technique. The former device has been used to carry out infiltration laboratory tests aimed at investigating hydraulic boundary conditions acting at the lowermost surface of the soil column for different contact types (pumices, atmosphere, a geosynthetic material). The latter exposes the layer at atmosphere to investigate water fluxes across the uppermost surface induced by the soil-atmosphere interaction. The work shows how the developed physical models feature the hydrological behavior of a silty pyroclastic layer under various meteorological forcing, allowing to build up frameworks useful to characterize the main factors inducing landslides.
 
Read and download the full paper:

Pagano L., Reder A., Rianna G.
Experiments to investigate the hydrological behaviour of volcanic covers
2014, Procedia Earth and Planetary Science, vol 9, pp 14-22, DOI: 10.1016/j.proeps.2014.06.013

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