NASA partners with Pacific Disaster Center on new landslide hazard assessment and warning system

A collaboration between NASA and University of Hawaii’s Pacific Disaster Center (PDC) was recently made public on October 26, regarding NASA’s Landslide Hazard Assessment for Situational Awareness model (LHASA) and PDC’s DisasterAWARE.

Furthermore, NASA spent years on the development and testing of LHASA, an open-source machine learning model that was trained by a database of historical landslides, including the environmental conditions surrounding them.

This model is capable of recognizing the likelihood of a landslide occurring, based on location, environmental data and near real-time precipitation monitoring from NASA’s IMERG.

Therefore, it is capable of monitoring rainfall induced landslide hazard for the greatest part of the planet, around the clock.

LHASA can be of great value as landslides cause billions of dollars in damage and thousands of fatalities each year, while developing countries bear a disproportionately heavier toll.

Partnering with PDC, this model was integrated into the DisasterAWARE platform, which provides early warning and risk assessment services for 19 different types of natural hazards.

This way, LHASA’s data is mapped on the platform and can help decision makers assess landslide risks quickly and effectively. In addition to this, DisasterAWARE’s mobile app can create and send regional hazard alerts to its users.

Finally, the platform is also capable of providing regional risk reports regarding the number of people and infrastructure exposed to the disaster, so that effective remediation or prevention plans can be taken accordingly by decision makers worldwide.

It is worth noting that this is not the first collaboration between the two organizations, which have worked together in the past and deployed NASA’s global flood modeling tool, among others.