Multi-scale signatures of climate change on landslide susceptibility: a case study for the Pacific Coast of the United States
Abstract
Landslides are among the deadliest and most costly natural disasters, resulting in thousands of deaths and many billions of dollars in damages each year. Rainfall is the most widespread and frequent trigger of landslides. Climate change has increased rainfall intensity and, thus, we hypothesize an associated increase in landslide susceptibility. Our work investigates: 1) the relationship between landslides and hydroclimatic triggers, and 2) the sensitivity of this modeled relationship to parameter data availability and pixel resolution. We focus here on a case study for Northern California, with the ultimate goal of scaling up our analyses to examine landslide susceptibility at the regional level. We use logistic regression of landslides onto parameters to investigate the relationship between predictor variables (rainfall, land cover, proximity to faults, slope, aspect) and landslide susceptibility. Preliminary results illustrate the relative spatial likelihood of landslides over modern Northern California and indicate that there is a statistically significant relationship between rainfall and landslides (p-value < 0.01). However, we suspect that this modeled relationship varies spatiotemporally and as a result of the availability and resolution of parameter data. With the intention of scaling our analyses to the contiguous Pacific Coast (CA, OR, WA), we evaluate the sensitivity of our model to parameter data availability and resolution, and to the spatial extent of the study area considered. This work will allow us to investigate the relationship between climate change and multi-scale trends in landslide susceptibility, and may also inform subsequent studies examining the future probability of landslides under further climate change.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFMEP53F1980J
- Keywords:
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- 0414 Biogeochemical cycles;
- processes;
- and modeling;
- BIOGEOSCIENCESDE: 1630 Impacts of global change;
- GLOBAL CHANGEDE: 1807 Climate impacts;
- HYDROLOGYDE: 1824 Geomorphology: general;
- HYDROLOGY