Open Inventories of Rainfall-Triggered Landslides

Abstract

Landslide inventories support both post-event response and predictive model evaluation, but it remains challenging to create public, current, comprehensive, and accurate landside inventories. In response to this need, thousands of rainfall-triggered landslides were mapped and organized within the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Cooperative Open-Online Landslide Repository (COOLR), which contains over 11,000 landslide reports from the Global Landslide Catalog. Recently, 22 inventories containing thousands of rainfall-triggered landslides have been added to COOLR, which was re-organized to better accommodate large landslide inventories. All the data are available on the “Landslide Viewer” web application, which also shows referenced and imported landslide inventories from other researchers. The new inventories are each connected to a landslide-triggering rainfall event, and therefore their date of occurrence was usually known. Landslide events were found by searching through credible sources or due to an external request for support during a disaster response. In either case, high-resolution imagery was utilized to digitize the landslides in the region. The resulting data can be used for various purposes, such as model training and validation. To demonstrate their potential, satellite precipitation was analyzed with reference to the new inventories. The precipitation analysis highlights the potential of daily satellite precipitation estimates in areas with limited ground precipitation observations. Some of the heavy precipitation events were underestimated, but many were captured and could inform future landslide hazard assessment.