Skip to main content

Landslide Hazard Assessment

Rainfall-triggered landslides affect nearly every state in the U.S. and every country in the world, causing significant economic damage and resulting in thousands of fatalities each year. Characterizing and modeling these hazards over large scales is challenging due to the fairly small areas over which they typically occur. A new website has been developed to provide a regional and global perspective on rainfall-triggered landslides. The website houses the Global Landslide Catalog (GLC), which was developed at NASA GSFC with the goal of identifying rainfall-triggered landslide events around the world, regardless of size, impacts or location. The GLC considers all types of mass movements triggered by rainfall, which have been reported in the media, disaster databases, scientific reports, or other sources. The GLC has been compiled since 2007 and the website provides this information in a searchable and exportable format. There is also a hazard event editor that is designed to enable the community to contribute to global flood and landslide event reports using an online portal and crowd sourcing environment. Anyone is invited to participate in this collaborative framework. 

The website also provides visualizations of daily precipitation information from the TRMM and GPM missions. Lastly, there is a prototype Landslide Hazard Assessment model for Situational Awareness (LHASA) that provides near real-time landslide hazard nowcasts at a regional scale. Currently this system provides information over Central America and Hispaniola.

Website: https://landslides.nasa.gov