{"id":32174,"date":"2019-09-16T06:47:21","date_gmt":"2019-09-16T06:47:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/?p=32174"},"modified":"2019-09-16T06:47:21","modified_gmt":"2019-09-16T06:47:21","slug":"2019-northern-hemisphere-summer-monsoon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/2019\/09\/16\/2019-northern-hemisphere-summer-monsoon\/","title":{"rendered":"An update on landslides from the 2019 Northern Hemisphere monsoon season"},"content":{"rendered":"

An update on landslides from the 2019 Northern Hemisphere monsoon season<\/h4>\n

At the 2019 Northern Hemisphere summer monsoon season starts to decline, I have run a quick analysis of the landslides that I have recorded to date (following up on my post of a month or so ago looking at the number of landslides in July<\/a>).\u00a0 Whilst the 2019 total will increase slightly as I work back through the dataset to validate it (a process that usually uncovers some unrecorded events), the graph below is the dataset up to 11th September.\u00a0 The plotted data shows the cumulative number of landslides and the cumulative total number of fatalities worldwide up to that date:-<\/p>\n

\"Fatal

The cumulative total number of fatal landslides, and the cumlative total of the resulting fatalities, for 2019 up to 11th September 2019. Note the effects of the\u00a0 2019 Northern Hemisphere summer monsoon.<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

The effects of the 2019 Northern Hemisphere summer monsoon season are clear, showing a distinctive increase in the rate of fatal landslides from about day 180 (29th June, marked with the first vertical dashed line). This dramatically increased rate persists until about day 230 (18th August), when the number of recorded events reduces back to close to the normal (background) rate.\u00a0 Some of these landslides after this event are of course in the monsoon affected areas – for example, although they are not in the database as yet, Nepal suffered some fatal landslides at the end of last week, with one event killing six people<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Overall, the 2019 landslide year looks to be very similar to 2018.\u00a0 As of the end of August I had recorded 315 fatal landslides in 2019 (this number will rise as noted above), against 319 at the same point in 2018.\u00a0 The average for the period 2003 to 2018 (i.e. the entire range of the dataset) is 266 landslides, so the last couple of years have been notably worse than the long term average.<\/p>\n

I would also like to highlight an interesting aspect that I cannot really explain at the moment.\u00a0 This graph shows the number of fatal landslides recorded worldwide in August over the period 2003-2019:-<\/p>\n

\"Fatal

The total number of fatal landslides recorded in August worldwide for 2003-2019<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

It shows a generally increasing trend; August 2019 does not look exceptional (but will increase when I improve the data).\u00a0 By comparison, July shows quite a different pattern:-<\/p>\n

\"Landslides

The total number of fatal landslides recorded in July worldwide for 2003-2019.<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

Again, there is a clear rising trend.\u00a0 But from 2011 onwards the pattern seems to have changed, with the number of recorded landslides become highly variable from year to year.\u00a0 2019 is clearly the worst year on record.<\/p>\n

This apparent change in pattern may or may not be significant, but requires further investigation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A review of fatal landslides from the 2019 Northern Hemisphere summer monsoon suggests that the year has been significantly worse than the long term average<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":32178,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[542],"tags":[73,469,545,979],"class_list":["post-32174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-database-2","tag-fatal-landslides","tag-featured","tag-landslide-database","tag-monsoon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32174\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}