November 9, 2023, by Lisa Teas Conaway

The Sitka Sound Science Center Research staff have been busy over the years assessing and gathering data around landslides and the storms that can trigger them. That data has been compiled and presented to the public in the form of SitkaLandSlide.org, a website designed to inform current risks and help with mitigation practices. The new paper describes all the work that went into building statistical models, selecting the best predictive algorithms, and how they work from existing National Weather Service forecasts. The paper was coauthored by SSSC’s Lead Geoscientist Annette Patton, has been peer-reviewed and is now published in the journal “Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences.” It can be accessed online free of charge: https://nhess.copernicus.org/articles/23/3261/2023/.

What’s more exciting about this work is Annette Patton and our Executive Director Lisa Busch are currently on their way to the 6^th World Landslide Forum in Florence, Italy, to present the work done on landslide predictive models in Sitka, Alaska to a world audience.

This work was made possible through a grant by the National Science Foundation.