From scenario-based seismic hazard to scenario-based landslide hazard: fast-forwarding to the future via statistical simulations

Ground motion scenarios exists for most of the seismically active areas around the globe. They essentially correspond to shaking level maps at given earthquake return times which are used as reference for the likely areas under threat from future ground displacements. Being landslides in seismically actively regions closely controlled by the ground motion, one would expect that landslide susceptibility maps should change as the ground motion patterns change in space and time. However, so far, statistically-based landslide susceptibility assessments have primarily been used as time-invariant.In other words, the vast majority of the statistical models does not include the temporal effect of the main trigger in future landslide scenarios. In this work, we present an approach aimed at filling this gap, bridging current practices in the seismological community to those in the geomorphological and statistical ones. More specifically, we select an earthquake-induced landslide inventory corresponding to the 1994 Northridge earthquake and build a Bayesian Generalized Additive Model of the binomial family, featuring common morphometric and thematic covariates as well as the Peak Ground Acceleration generated by the Northridge earthquake. Once each model component has been estimated, we have run 1000 simulations for each of the 217 possible ground motion scenarios for the study area. From each batch of 1000 simulations, we have estimated the mean and 95% Credible Interval to represent the mean susceptibility pattern under a specific earthquake scenario, together with its uncertainty level. Because each earthquake scenario has a specific return time, our simulations allow to incorporate the temporal dimension into any susceptibility model, therefore driving the results toward the definition of landslide hazard. Ultimately, we also share our results in vector format – a .mif file that can be easily converted into a common shapefile –. There, we report the mean (and uncertainty) susceptibility of each 1000 simulation batch for each of the 217 scenarios.