Nov. 27, 2012 A NASA study using TRMM satellite data revealed
that the year 2010 was a particularly bad year for landslides
around the world. A recent NASA study published in the October
issue of the Journal of Hydrometeorology compared satellite rain
data from NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM) to
landslides in central eastern China, Central America and the
Himalayan Arc, three regions with diverse climates and
topography where rainfall-triggered landslides are frequent and
destructive hazards to the local populations. The work, led by
Dalia Kirschbaum, a research physical scientist in the
Hydrological Sciences Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight
Center in Greenbelt, Md., is part of an ongoing effort to
catalog worldwide rainfall-triggered landslides -- one of the
world's lesser known but often catastrophic natural hazards.
Locating them is a step in an effort to be able, one day, to
predict and warn. Currently, Kirschbaum explains, no consistent
regional or global scale warning system