Work

An empirical method to forecast the effect of storm intensity on shallow landslide abundance

Year: 2013

Type: article

Abstract: We hypothesize that the number of shallow landslides a storm triggers in a landscape increases with rainfall intensity, duration and the number of unstable model cells for a given shallow landslide susceptibility model of that landscape. For selected areas in California, USA, we use digital maps of historic shallow landslides with adjacent rainfall records to construct a relation between rainfall intensity and the fraction of unstable model cells that actually failed in historic storms. We find that this fraction increases as a power law with the 6-hour rainfall intensity for sites in southern California. We use this relation to forecast shallow landslide abundance for a dynamic numerical simulation storm for California, representing the most extreme historic storms known to have impacted the state.

Source: Quaternary International

DOI: 10.1016/j.quaint.2013.07.115

Authors: Jonathan D. Stock, Dino Bellugi

Institutions: United States Geological Survey, University of California, Berkeley

Language: English

Topic: Landslides and related hazards

Subfield: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

Field: Environmental Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: diamond

Funders: U.S. Department of Energy, Strong, Office of Science