Electrical Imaging for Landslide Monitoring: State-of-the-art and Future Challenges

In this paper we briefly resume the current start-of-the-art of the electrical imaging techniques for monitoring hydro-geological instability phenomena. An overview of the more interesting results obtained in the Southern-Apennine chain (Italy), that is one of the Mediterranean areas affected by large and diffuse landslide events, is presented and discussed. Furthermore, we focus the attention on novel and challenging applications of the electrical imaging. To-date, combining robust techniques for tomographic data inversion and new distributed sensor network for field data acquisition is possible to obtain 3D high-resolution electrical images and time-lapse 4D tomographies able to follow the spatial and temporal dynamics of electrical parameters (i.e., resistivity, self-potential) in landslide bodies.