Discussion of “Oso, Washington, landslide of March 22, 2014: Dynamic analysis” by Jordan Aaron, Oldrich Hungr, Timothy D. Stark, and Ahmed K. Baghdady

The original paper under discussion states that it “explains the spectacular mobility of the 2014 Oso landslide.” It addresses this objective by using two versions of the DAN model to compute the distribution of deposits produced by the landslide. The main purpose of this discussion is to demonstrate that the authors’ model is incapable of explaining the Oso landslide’s mobility—even though the model can be tuned to mimic the landslide’s distribution of deposits. An ancillary purpose is to contrast the authors’ model with the Oso landslide model of Iverson et al. (2015) and Iverson and George (2016), and to rebut false statements that the authors made about that model.