Heavy rainfall can trigger a slope failure in the case, for example, of a shallow soil deposit of different grading and origin which is in a state of partial saturation. In this case of slope instability, the behaviour of the soil slope is closely related not only to the distribution of pore-water pressure but also the retention properties and the stress state during rainfall infiltration, which involves both mechanical and hydrological processes. In order to understand these physical key processes, a large-scale physical model of a slope was tested [1]. Sensors and optical fibres were introduced to monitor the pore water pressure, the moisture content and the strain [1, 2]. Rainfall was artificially produced by a system of nozzles. During the rainfall, water infiltrated in the shallow fine loose sand, reaching the interface with the sandy clay bed, thus saturating the upper layer. The increase in pore pressures triggered the slope collapse of the the sand layer. In this work, the rainfall induced slope failure is modelled as a coupled variably saturated thermo-hydro-mechanical problem using the geometrically linear finite element code Comes-Geo [3, 4, 5]. The comparison between the experimental and the numerical results is presented, showing the capability of the numerical model to describe the experimental results and to understand the triggering mechanisms during the progressive failure of the experimental slope. [1] Lora, M., Camporese, M., Troch, P. A. & Salandin, P. Rainfall-triggered shallow landslides: infiltration dynamics in a physical hillslope model. Hydrological Processes 30, 3239–3251, 2016 [2] Schenato, L., Palmieri, L., Camporese, M. et al. Distributed optical fibre sensing for early detection of shallow landslides triggering. Sci Rep 7, 14686, 2017 [3] Sanavia L., F. Pesavento, B.A. Schrefler Finite element analysis of non-isothermal multiphase geomaterials with application to strain localisation simulation, Computational Mechanics, 37 (4), 331-348, 2006 [4] Cao, T. D., Sanavia, L., and Schrefler, B. A. A thermo-hydro-mechanical model for multiphase geomaterials in dynamics with application to strain localization simulation. Int. J. Numer. Meth. Engng, 107: 312–337, 2016 [5] Sanavia, L., Cao D.T. Modelling multiphase geomaterials at high temperatures in dynamics with application to strain localization and rapid catastrophic landslides. Poromechanics VI: Proceedings of the Sixth Biot Conference on Poromechanics. July 9-13, 2017