As regular readers will know, since 2002 I have been
maintaining a database of landslides that kill people worldwide (and this work was
recently published in the Journal Geology). In that dataset
2010 is the year with the highest level of losses from rainfall-induced landslides - it truly was a remarkable year. In a recent paper (
available online here and published behind a pay wall in the
Journal of Hydrometeorology),
Dalia Kirschbaum from NASA and colleagues (Kirschbaum
et al.
2012) have used their own catalogue of mass movement events to examine
the relationship between landslides and heavy rainfall. The landslide
catalogue that they have used is rather different to mine because it
compiles information about all reported rapidly moving landslides,
irrespective of their impact. As such it is more comprehensive than my
dataset, although it may be more subject to the vagaries of media and
other types of reporting. In this study, the catalogue has been
compared with precipitation data from the TRMM satellite. The TMPA
dataset that they have used combines the TRMM data with rain gauge data
to produce daily global rainfall dataset at a resolution on 0.25 x 0.25
degrees. This dataset is known to represent large rainfall events quite
well.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the landslide dataset used here
also show unusually high levels of landslide activity in 2010, with the
increase above normal levels occurring primarily in Central America, the
Himalayan Arc and Central-Eastern China. In each case, the authors
clearly show that the elevated levels of landslide activity were
associated with rainfall levels that were above normal. So, for
example, this is the data for South Asia
Read the rest of this post on the home of this blog on the AGU blog site by clicking here
1 comment:
Those are some scary facts. I don't think landslides get enough focus in the news. But maybe they aren't interesting enough to the general public. I wonder if a combination of higher rain with something else is the final trigger.
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