Landslide Runout Animation¶

Simulate the runout extent, sediment transport and topographic change caused by the retrogressive enlargement of a landslide scar in the Cascade Mountains, WA, USA

In this tutorial, the user models the runout of a landslide that occurred near Mt. St. Helens in Washington State in December of 2021. The landslide was associated with the retrogressive enlargement of an existing landslide scar. The existing landslide scar formed during a much larger landslide in 2009. The 2021 enlargement failed along the upper edge of the 2009 scar and ranout down the center of the 2009 runout path. It intersected the S-1000, a forest road recently reconstructed below the landslide and another forest road below it before coming to rest at a river valley at the base of the slope.

To model the landslide runout caused by the 2021 enlargement, the user loads a DEM, recorded after te 2009 landslide but before the 2021 enlargement, the mapped extent of the enlargement, defines the failure depth and parameterizes MassWastingRunout (MWR) to match observed runout extent, erosion and deposition caused by the enlargement. At the end of the notebook, a DEM-of-Difference (DoD) of the modeled runout is visually compared with a DoD of the observed runout.