ABSTRACT
This paper presents part of a research work underway at the Pontíficia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in which effects of sound waves from thunderstorms are being investigated as a potential source of instability of initially unsaturated soil slopes. Undisturbed soil blocks, retrieved from a site in which hundreds of landslides occurred recently in Brazil, were instrumented with tensiometers, TDRs and accelerometers and subjected to effects of thunder sound replicated waves. This paper presents the general set up of the developed experiment and discusses the response of the tensiometers to the sound waves.
