Publications

Following wildfires, emergency-response and public-safety agencies are faced often with making evacuation decisions and deploying resources both well in advance of each coming winter storm and during storms themselves. Information critical to this process is provided for recently burned areas in the San Gabriel Mountains of southern California. The National Weather Service (NWS) issues Quantitativ

The state of knowledge and resources available to issue alerts of precipitation-induced landslides vary across the USA. Federal and state agencies currently issue warnings of the potential for shallow, rapidly moving landslides and debris flows in a few areas along the Pacific coast and for areas affected by Atlantic hurricanes. However, these agencies generally lack resources needed to provide co

Wildfire enhances the geomorphic response of a watershed to precipitation events, effectively altering the form of the hillslope and channel drainage network. Typically, drainage networks expand following rainfall on a recently burned watershed. Expansion of drainage networks following wildfire increases in erosion and sediment transport rates, and the probability of flash-flooding and debris-flow

This layer is an inventory of existing landslides deposits in the Little North Santiam River Basin, Oregon (2009). Each landslide deposit shown on this map has been classified according to a number of specific characteristics identified at the time recorded in the GIS database. The classification scheme was developed by the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries (Burns and Madin, 2009

A typhoon (Typhoon No. 10) attacked Shikoku Island and the Tyugoku area of Japan in 2004. This typhoon produced a new daily precipitation record of 1317 mm on Shikoku Island and triggered hundreds of landslides in Tokushima Prefecture. One catastrophic landslide was triggered in the Shiraishi area of Kisawa village, and destroyed more than 10 houses while also leaving an unstable block high on the

Empirical models to estimate the probability of occurrence and volume of postwildfire debris flows can be quickly implemented in a geographic information system (GIS) to generate debris-flow hazard maps either before or immediately following wildfires. Models that can be used to calculate the probability of debris-flow production from individual drainage basins in response to a given storm were de

We examined elevation changes detected from two successive sets of Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data in the northern Coast Range of Oregon. The first set of LiDAR data was acquired during leafon conditions and the second set during leaf-off conditions. We were able to successfully identify and map active landslides using a differential digital elevation model (DEM) created from the two LiDA

Earthquakes on strike-slip faults can produce devastating natural hazards. However, because they consist predominantly of lateral motion, these faults are rarely associated with significant uplift or tsunami generation. And although submarine slides can generate tsunami, only a few per cent of all tsunami are believed to be triggered in this way. The 12 January Mw 7.0 Haiti earthquake exhibited pr

The Gulf of Mexico (GOM) is a geologically diverse ocean basin that includes three distinct geologic provinces: a carbonate province, a salt province, and canyon to deep-sea fan province, all of which contain evidence of submarine mass movements. The threat of submarine landslides in the GOM as a generator of near-field damaging tsunamis has not been widely addressed. Submarine landslides in the G

Shallow rainfall-induced landslides commonly occur under conditions of transient infiltration into initially unsaturated soils. In an effort to predict the timing and location of such landslides, we developed a model of the infiltration process using a two-layer system that consists of an unsaturated zone above a saturated zone and implemented this model in a geographic information system (GIS) fr

The Meadow Creek landslide, part of the Coal Hill landslide complex in western Kane County, Utah, is about 1.7 miles (2.7 km) wide and 1.3 miles (2.1 km) long and contains six smaller historical slides. The upper part of the Meadow Creek landslide is gently sloping and consists of displaced and back-rotated blocks of Cretaceous Dakota and Cedar Mountain Formations that form northeast- to locally

Rates and styles of landslide motion are sensitive to pore-water pressure changes caused by changes in soil porosity accompanying shear deformation. Soil may either contract or dilate upon shearing, depending upon whether its initial porosity is greater or less, respectively, than a critical-state porosity attained after sufficiently high strain. We observed complications in this behavior, however