PR759-253910-Z01 Developing Awareness for Regional Landslide Management Appalachia Region

This report provides a framework to support developing a regional awareness of landslide processes to support pipeline integrity decision making. The framework is demonstrated using data from the Appalachian Plateau. Operator landslide inventories, documented landslide activity, and monitoring data were integrated with public topographic and geologic datasets to delineate land-slide subregions with similar behavior. Displacement trends were evaluated within each subregion, focusing on landslides whose movement and/or acceleration could be confidently attributed to a single 12-month period. Hydroclimatic conditions were characterized using publicly available datasets including ERA5-LAND soil moisture percentiles, NOAA Stage IV precipitation estimates, and PRISM 30-year normals for normalized precipitation.

A key finding for the Appalachia study area is that elevated antecedent soil moisture is consistently associated with increased landslide activity, with accelerations occurring preferentially under high-er fall/winter soil moisture conditions. Preceding summer soil moisture (July through September) was also identified as a leading indicator of fall/winter soil moisture. Using summer soil moisture as a leading indicator of fall/winter conditions can support Operators’ seasonal landslide management planning. The report provides a framework, applied to the Appalachia Plateau, that incorporates Operator and publicly available data to assess relationships between landslide activity and hydroclimatic drivers in order to inform seasonal planning and near-term operational decisions.

The intended audience are geohazard integrity managers and specialists who need structured and repeatable methodology in which to compare landslide behavior across large areas and across years. Decision-support tools were reviewed with Operators and are provided for regions with relatively short-response times to soil moisture (e.g., Appalachia). More generic examples are also provided to contextualize regions with longer-lag times. For the Appalachia region, an example tool allows geohazard integrity managers to establish thresholds for both preceding summer and winter/fall soil moisture conditions to establish situational awareness and possibly inform land-slide monitoring and resource allocation decisions.

The zip deliverable includes 4 files:

1. Final Report – PR759-253901-R01 Developing Awareness for Regional Landslide Management Appalachia Region.pdf

2. Google Collab Appalachia Prototype Soil Moisture Tool (Jupyter Notebook) – AppendixA_colab.ipynb

3. Data – AppendixA_Tool.zip

4. PRCI Software EULA.pdf