Dear CEE community,

Please join us this Thursday, September 26 at 3:30 in More Hall room 220 for the environment and water program seminar. To kick-off the series, I will do a short introduction of the seminar course and give the first seminar that covers some work I and CEE PhD student Hunter Jimenez did during my sabbatical in Turkey. Abstract for our talk is below. 

You can find the fall program here: https://depts.washington.edu/watersem/

Compound impact of extremes: The 2023 Türkiye-Syria cascading earthquake hazards exacerbated by an atmospheric river (AR) precipitation event

Erkan Istanbulluoglu, Hunter Jimenez 

Cascading earthquake hazards refer to a chain of secondary hazards triggered by an initial earthquake, including co-seismic and post-seismic rainfall-driven landslides, mudflows, and floods enhanced by sedimentation in channels. Two main earthquakes, Mw 7.7 and Mw 7.6 occurred on Feb. 6, 2023 within the East Anatolian fault system nine hours apart. This earthquake triggered more than 3,600 coseismic landslides. A rare AR event swept through the central part of the earthquake region, causing damage to infrastructure and life loss. Following large earthquakes there is a time window of elevated flood and sediment hazards. This talk will address the following question: How can we develop cascading earthquake hazard maps for rapid risk assessment purposes following large earthquakes? We will discuss how earthquakes amplify post-seismic landslides and how pre-seismic rainfall extremes may exacerbate coseismic landslides using the Landlab open-source modeling toolkit and satellite-based soil, vegetation, and rainfall products.