MAJOR PROBLEMS OF KARST HAZARD FORECASTING

At the present stage of development of engineering karst for the purpose of development and evaluation of karst territories used methods can be divided into three groups: qualitative, quantitative and probabilistic. Qualitative methods are characterized by certain conditionality and subjectivity, as a rule, they are used at the first stages of the assessment and prognosis of karst process and often take into account those aspects and features of karst development, which can not take into account by the quantitative methods, in this regard, a complete rejection of the use of qualitative methods is not correct. Inherently almost all quantitative methods use of the information on the number and morphometric characteristics of surface karst forms. A special group is probabilistic methods, the founder of which is one of the leading karst engineers V.V. Tolmachev. The basis of the probability estimate is the following assumptions: karst sinkholes formation in time close to the law of rare events (Poisson law), distribution of the diameters of sinkholes close to the lognormal or, under certain conditions, to a normal distribution. Probabilistic estimation of karst will more objective at the homogeneous area by the mechanism of formation, intensity, size of karst sinkholes, therefore researched area should be preliminary subject to zoning. Analysis of various methods has revealed the following problems of karst hazard forecast. A single set of traits and factors used in forecast of karst hazard is absent. Most prognosis models constructed according to the analysis of surface karst forms, which, do not exactly reflect the space underground karst, which leads to mixed results. For the reliability of the majority of methods of the forecast requires a long period of observation with a certain quality of data. Thus, it becomes necessary of change the paradigm of karst forecasting from an abridged variant of "practical" analysis of parameters of surface karst forms and their formal distribution on the territory to the "complex" analysis, taking into account the features of the spatial distribution, morphology and morphometry of surface and underground karst forms under the influence of geological features hydrogeological structure of karst massif.