November 2025 Meeting Announcement Details

Hindcasting Hurricane Helene

Presented by: Tom Stanley 

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On September 26, 2024, NASA’s global landslide nowcast showed the potential for landslides in the southern Appalachian mountains on the following day. Most (57%) landslides reported during and after Hurricane Helene were in areas with a high (>50%) probability of landslide occurrence. Nevertheless, the extent of the damage encouraged a review of what changes could be made to improve landslide forecasting in the eastern United States. The first and most obvious task was to investigate whether high-resolution precipitation data would outperform the coarser global dataset currently used to produce the global landslide nowcast.

 

In this case study, the potential improvement from high-resolution forecasts was assessed by comparing four precipitation datasets against ground-based observations, as well as the distribution of landslides caused by Hurricane Helene. The results conclusively showed that high-resolution forecasts could have predicted more (84%) of the reported landslides than the currently running model.

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Biography:​

Thomas Stanley graduated from the University of Maryland in 2014 with a Masters in Geospatial Information Sciences. In the years since, he has collaborated with other scientists at Goddard Space Flight Center to develop static and dynamic models of landslide hazard at global and regional scales. These models rely on satellite-based estimates of precipitation, as well as remotely sensed observations of other variables.​