Near-Surface Geophysical Characterization of Areas Prone to Natural Hazards: A Review of the Current and Perspective on the Future

Natural hazards such as landslides, floods, rockfalls, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, sinkholes, and snow avalanches represent potential risks to our infrastructures, properties, and lives. That potential will continue to escalate with current and continued human encroachment into risk areas. With the help of geophysical techniques many of those risks can be better understood and quantified, thereby minimized and at least partly mitigated through accurate, site-specific, and proper planning and engineering. On occasions these hazards simply cannot be avoided, but better characterization and therefore understanding of the subsurface geology and natural processes responsible for the threats is possible through integration of various cost-effective geophysical methods with relevant geotechnical, geomechanical, and hydrogeological methods. With the enhanced characterization possible when geophysics is incorporated into natural hazard analysis, potential risks can be better quantified and remediation plans tuned to minimize the threat most natural hazards present to civilizations. In this article we will first review common geophysical methods that can be and have been utilized in studying natural hazard prone areas, then we provide selected case studies and approaches using predominantly our own examples, and finally a look into the future detailing how these methods and technologies can be better implemented and thereby more time- and cost-effective and provide improved results.