Landslide

Five years ago, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Core Observatory as a joint satellite. Since then, the instruments on GPM have provided advanced measurements about rain and snow particles within clouds, Earth’s precipitation patterns, extreme weather and precipitation that affects communities around the world.

GPM was engineered to get data to scientists, operational and application users as soon as possible for societal benefits. It obtains data quickly using the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) 12-member satellite constellation, which serves as an information pipeline between Earth-orbiting satellites and NASA ground stations. On average, GPM can take one to three hours to get data into users’ hands, but in emergencies, the average delivery time can be shortened to between 15 and 90 minutes.

GPM’s main…

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The training date is in the past. However, videos and resources of the training can be accessed here.

According to the WHO, every year disasters “kill around 90,000 people and affect close to 160 million people worldwide.” This training will show participants how NASA remote sensing data can be used to characterize and monitor disaster-related events and support relief efforts. Each session will cover a different disaster and its supporting data. Disaster scenarios include tropical storms, flooding, earthquakes, and landslides.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this training, attendees will be able to:

• Identify NASA data products to characterize and monitor the disasters, Tropical Storms, Flooding, Landslides and…

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On 12 March, Nepal Telecommunications Authority (NTA) signed an agreement with French satellite operator Thales Alenia Space to build Nepal’s first communications satellite. The Nepalese government intends to use the satellite to provide nationwide internet access to its citizens, improve disaster management efforts and strengthen economic growth in the country.

The development of Nepal’s own satellite system proves to be significant in terms of improving the country’s disaster management efforts. Nepal is regularly faces natural disasters such as droughts, floods, landslides, fires, and…

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This webinar aims to show how to use SAR interferometry (InSAR) to identify and map land subsidence using the ESA SNAP Sentinel-1 Toolbox. It demonstrate how to access the RUS Service and how to download, process, analyze and visualize the free data acquired by the Copernicus satellites.

The Global Fatal Landslide Database (GFLD) has been consistently collected and maintained since 2004. Systematic metadata search tools based in the English language are used to identify relevant reports of landslide activity. Reports are corroborated and data updated by source triangulation using government and aid agency reports, academic papers and personal communications as new information becomes available. This version of the dataset contains all non-seismically triggered fatal landslide events from 2004 to 2016. A web platform is currently under development to host the full database openly and provide users with more functionality, including data download and crowd source reporting.

While several studies have already highlighted how global warming and its consequences are predicted to increase the frequency and magnitude of geohazards such as landslides, the relation between ongoing climate shifts and landslide behaviour is still difficult to assess, especially due to uncertainties in both models. In a new research paper, researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and collaborating institutions have now documented the transition of a stable, slow-moving landslide into catastrophic collapse for the first time.

Their  observations lasted eight years and took place on the California Coast Ranges, which, due to their morphological structure, are an ideal natural laboratory to investigate how stress and fluid pressure changes govern the stable and unstable sliding of landslides. In recent years, more than 650 slow-moving landslides have been identified and mapped in the area. Yet, on May 20, 2017, the Mud Creek landslide suddenly…

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ESA's Earth Observation Thematic Exploitation Platform (TEP) is a browser for satellite imagery and specific products on an environmental topic. The TEP platforms are divided into 7 categories: Coastal; Forstry; Geohazards; Hydrology; Polar; Urban; and Food Security. Each platform is a collaborative, virtual work environment providing access to EO data and the tools, processors and Information and Communication Technology resources required to work with them. TEP aims to bridge the gap between the users and the data and tools.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) of the United States is currently building a worldwide database of landslide events. The Cooperative Open Online Landslide Repository (COOLR) includes NASA’s Global Landslide Catalog (GLC) which provides new insights into landslide hazards around the world. 

The COOLR project is an open platform where scientists and citizen scientists around the world can share landslide reports to guide awareness of landslide hazards for improving scientific modelling and emergency response.

Landslides cause billions of dollars in infrastructural damage and thousands of deaths every year around the world. However, although data on past landslide events guides future disaster prevention, a global picture of exactly where and when landslides occur does still not exist. 

There are three main reasons why it is difficult to monitor landslides globally. First, landslides often occur…

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