New global characterisation of landslide exposure

Emberson, Robert; Kirschbaum, Dalia; Stanley, Thomas

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-20-3413-2020

Articles | Volume 20, issue 12

https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-20-3413-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue:

Global- and continental-scale risk assessment for natural...

https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-20-3413-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 20, issue 12

Research article

| Highlight paper

|

14 Dec 2020

Research article | Highlight paper |

| 14 Dec 2020

New global characterisation of landslide exposure

Robert Emberson, Dalia Kirschbaum, and Thomas Stanley

Download

Final revised paper (published on 14 Dec 2020)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 22 Jan 2020)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

- Printer-friendly version

- Supplement

RC1: 'Review for paper 'New Global Characterisation of Landslide Hazard'', Anonymous Referee #1, 13 Feb 2020
- AC1: 'Response to Reviewer #1; all comments attached', Robert Emberson, 09 Jul 2020
RC2: 'Review of Emberson et al.', Anonymous Referee #2, 28 May 2020
- AC2: 'Response to reviewer #2; comments attached', Robert Emberson, 09 Jul 2020

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (further review by editor and referees) (20 Jul 2020) by Philip Ward

AR by Robert Emberson on behalf of the Authors (04 Aug 2020) Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (24 Aug 2020) by Philip Ward

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (01 Sep 2020)

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (14 Sep 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

I think the authors did a great job responding to the reviews and the paper is nearly ready for publication with a few minor corrections that I listed below:

I suggest the authors include the raster files and shapefiles for the layers shown in the figures in the supplement (or another data archiving site), or at least releasing a kmz file with the paper. That will make it a lot more usable by others.

Figures: The figures are referenced out of order in the text, Fig 5 is presented in text before 3 and 4. Some discussion about some figures (Fig 4 in particular) occurs prior to the figure being presented in the text.
Many of the tick labels on the figures are far too small and need to be increased. For the scatterplots (Figs 3, 5, 6, 7), I really wanted to know what countries were which when they were discussed in the text, so I suggest labeling select dots that are mentioned in the text and also labeling any outliers (like the authors already did in Figure 8)

Figure 2: This figure is still hard to see because the pixels are so small relative to the size of the map, I would suggest showing the same zoomed in area for all three (Switzerland is fine) but also modifying the color maps and/or using some pyramiding/resampling methods to better visualize the plots at the scale of the map.

Figure 4: This figure should be presented in the text in the results section, it is one of the main results of the paper so it can be bigger so it is easier to see. It also should be cleaned up by rounding the labels in the legend, making sure the legends don't overlap and possibly adding arrows pointing to some regions of interest that are discussed in the text.

Line by line (line numbers are from the tracked changes document)

L414: may benefit -> may be useful to

L488: state what the official levels are here (low, moderate, high...), because later they are used (moderate, high etc.) but it seems like those are just qualitative terms later in the text, but actually they are explicitly defined by LHASA.

L492-494: How is ARI weighted?

L521: What is definition of "historical" here? The time period of the satellite precip data? If so, that's not very historical because it doesn't go back very far. Or do the authors mean a longer term precipitation record?

L602-604: Are these point locations? If so, is the density computation done assuming they are all of equal area?

L650-657: Also clarify that this requires the assumption that the completeness is uniform across each country.

L729: What figure should the reader look at to follow this paragraph of the discussion?

L779: Move this to the results

L781: It might be interesting to add a figure of the US or Brazil broken down by country or other internal subdivision to illustrate this point and show the distribution.

L842: Citation needed for the extensive mitigation efforts of Germany and Hong Kong if this is a known fact. Otherwise, clarify that this is speculation.

Hide

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (18 Sep 2020) by Philip Ward

AR by Robert Emberson on behalf of the Authors (23 Sep 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (13 Oct 2020) by Philip Ward

AR by Robert Emberson on behalf of the Authors (19 Oct 2020)

Download

Article (7932 KB)
Full-text XML

Short summary

Landslides cause thousands of fatalities and cost billions of dollars of damage worldwide every year, but different inventories of landslide events can have widely diverging completeness. This can lead to spatial biases in our understanding of the impacts. Here we use a globally homogeneous model of landslide hazard and exposure to provide consistent estimates of where landslides are most likely to cause damage to people, roads and other critical infrastructure at 1 km resolution.