Process-Chain Analysis of Viscoplastic Landslide-Generated Impulse Waves from Initial Slide Conditions Through Water-Entry Dynamics to Wave Responses

A key scientific challenge in landslide-generated impulse-wave research is to determine how initial slide conditions are translated into wave responses through the intermediate water-entry process. Existing data-driven studies generally focus on direct prediction or variable-importance ranking and therefore provide limited insight into the pathways linking slide release, water entry, and wave generation. To address this issue, a three-stage process-chain framework was developed using 290 laboratory test cases, integrating initial slide conditions, water-entry dynamics, and wave responses. Cross-stage correlation analysis, standardized path modeling, mediation-effect decomposition, cascade prediction, bootstrap resampling, and diagnostic analyses were jointly applied. The results show that relative effective entry mass M is strongly correlated with relative wave amplitude A and relative wave height H, with Spearman coefficients of 0.96 and 0.91, respectively, while the corresponding coefficients for the entry Froude number Fr are 0.71 and 0.80. Within the present dataset and fitted model, mediation analysis indicates that the pathways through M have the largest modeled indirect contributions: the indirect effects of initial slide mass through M are 0.652 for A and 0.600 for H, whereas the corresponding effects of the Bingham number are −0.669 and −0.615. The cascade framework further shows that the realized entry state can be systematically reconstructed from the initial conditions and used as an explicit intermediate layer for wave-response prediction. Prediction comparisons further show that the observed entry-state model is best interpreted as an explanatory or diagnostic benchmark because it uses measured entry-state variables, whereas the direct initial-condition and cascade models address prospective prediction from prescribed initial-condition information. The main advantage of the cascade framework therefore lies in its physical interpretability rather than a substantial gain in predictive accuracy. Within the present dataset and fitted model, the associations between the initial slide conditions and wave responses are expressed mainly through mass-related and inertia-related pathways involving the realized entry state.