15 January 2010 20:45 in Uncategorized by Dave Petley
The Haiti earthquake rightly continues to dominate the news around the world, with the situation on the ground looking increasingly desperate. The news media are already reporting on the growing frustration amongst the population about the lack of aid, not uncommon in large disasters actually, but probably magnified in this case. Although every rapid onset disaster is different, in a number of ways this event takes us into new territory. …
Tags: earthquake conference, Haiti, hurricane, mudslide, tropical cyclone
18 December 2009 03:11 in Uncategorized by Dave Petley
I am going to split my AGU Day 4 report into two posts. This one will cover the session this morning on the communication of the science of environmental change, whilst the second post will cover the landslide sessions. The first session that I attended this morning was an excellent, experience-led examination of how to communicate environmental science to the public and to policy-makers. The central theme was, perhaps inevitably, …
Tags: AGU, climate change, communicating science
18 December 2009 03:11 in Uncategorized by Dave Petley
I am going to split my AGU Day 4 report into two posts. This one will cover the session this morning on the communication of the science of environmental change, whilst the second post will cover the landslide sessions. The first session that I attended this morning was an excellent, experience-led examination of how to communicate environmental science to the public and to policy-makers. The central theme was, perhaps inevitably, …
Tags: AGU, climate change, communicating science
1 November 2009 20:36 in Uncategorized by Dave Petley
Just occasionally a paper appears that makes me sit up with surprise, with a strong sense of “I did not see that one coming!”. Just such a paper has appeared in pre-publication form in Nature Geoscience today – namely Schultz et al. (2009). This will undoubtedly represent the most surprising landslide paper of the year, and indeed for a few years in fact. I suspect that this paper will generate …
6 September 2009 21:33 in Uncategorized by Dave Petley
Here is the fatal landslide map for August 2009. As usual each yellow dot represents a single landslide that killed one or more people: Click on the map for a better (downloadable) view in a new window. The statistics are as follows:Number of recorded fatal landslides: 53Number of fatalities: 782 In terms of fatalities this places August well above the 2002-2008 average (347 fatalities). Of course this is dominated by …
Tags: August, Landslide data, landslide map
4 August 2009 21:28 in Uncategorized by Dave Petley
Below is the fatal landslide map for July 2009. Each yellow dot represents a single landslide that killed a person. The background is the etopo1 DEM, with the darker colours representing higher terrain. As usual clicking on the image should provide a high resolution view. The image is a GIF so you should be able to download it, but please acknowledge the source. You will see that in July the …
Tags: 2009, database, July, landslide map
2 August 2009 20:58 in Uncategorized by Dave Petley
One of the reasons that the northern hemisphere summer is essentially the global landslide season is that landfalling tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) represent a rather efficient way of triggering slope failures. This is especially the case in the Caribbean, Taiwan, Japan, SE and S China, the Philippines and Vietnam. Typhoon rain is astonishing to experience for the first time – peak intensities of 100 mm per hour are not …
Tags: china, hurricane, India, monsoon, South Korea, tropical cyclone, typhoon
3 June 2009 20:48 in Uncategorized by Dave Petley
In some parts of the world, such as the Seattle area of the USA, wide area landslide warning systems are operated on the basis of rainfall thresholds. These are comparatively simple in essence – basically the combination of short term and long term rainfall that is needed to trigger landslides is determined, often using historical records of landslide events. A critical threshold is determined for the combination of these two …
Tags: historic landslide, paper, precipitation, rainfall threshold, research, satellite, warning system
19 March 2009 14:42 in Uncategorized by Dave Petley
Richard Tieuw and several of my former colleagues at the Geohazard Reserach Centre at Portsmouth University in southern England have published a nice, short article in EOS looking at issues associated with the generation of tsunamis by coastal landslides. EOS is subscription only, but the article has been covered quite well by New Scientist (available online here), although they look at a particular aspect (see below). First, let’s take a …
1 October 2008 21:44 in Uncategorized by Dave Petley
For the first time in recorded history the monthly fatal landslide map is actually on time! Below is the map for September 2008. First the statistics:Number of recorded fatal landslides: 59Number of recorded fatalities: 1290 September has been a quite bizarre month, with fatal landslides occurring at a level that is much higher than expected. As such this continues the trend for August, which was also above average, but it …
Tags: 2008, Landslide data, landslide report, map
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