Uncertainty assessment in quantitative rockfall risk assessment

This study shows a quantitative rockfall risk assessment (QRA) for a slope of the Feifeng Mountain (China), including an explicit assessment of the uncertainties. For rockfall risk analysis, the annual probability of occurrence, reach probability, temporal–spatial probability and vulnerability of tourists were calculated for both dry and rainy day conditions. The resulting individual risk for exposed people visiting the historical site can be considered as acceptable for all scenarios, whereas the overall societal risk lies within the as low as reasonably practicable (ALARP) zone and therefore requires some mitigation actions. For the explicit assessment of uncertainty, an error propagation technique (first-order second moment (FOSM)) was adopted, starting from expert knowledge heuristic estimations of the coefficient of variation for each component of the risk analysis procedure. As a result, coefficients of variation of the calculated risk were obtained, ranging from 48 to 132 %, thus demonstrating the importance of accounting for uncertainty in rockfall risk modelling. A multi-criteria methodology is also proposed for the assessment of the standard deviation of the parameters adopted for the stochastic rockfall run-out model.