DEFORESTATION AROUND THE WORLD - India Environment Portal

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Deforestation Around the World
5000 landslides and ~3600 rock falls. The massive amount of potential energy was
transferred into heat and enhanced local convection. The following storms incurred ~358
debris flows, resulted in a direct economic loss of near $US60 billion. SEGMENT thus
simultaneously solves the thermal equation, the dynamic equations and the surface
kinematic (continuity) equations.
Fig. 3. Conceptual framework of SEGMENT-landslide for the projection of storm-induced
landslides. The numerical techniques, model physics, input and output parameters are
described in Ren et al. (2010b). The model has wide applications in many other geophysical
flows including glaciers and ice-sheets, snow and mud avalanches, soil and coastal erosion, sea
level change following ocean bottom tsunami, and pyroclastic flows such as magma from
volcanic eruptions. The land surface model component considers hydrological processes of
soils and vegetation. The mechanical properties of roots and the biomass loading also are
implemented in the landslide model component.Adapted from Ren et al. 2011a.
SEGMENT, because it synthetically simulates landslides over a continuous regional area,
can, in principle, minimize the false-alarm tendency of most empirical procedures. Against
the 2007 wild fire-burn background, using the observed precipitation, SEGMENT simulated
the landslide cases during year 2008 for a region with documented landslides (Ren et al.
2011b). Inserting the landslide model component into a scalable and extensible system (Fig.
3) also makes implementation of newly identified physical processes more convenient. This