Publications

Oklahoma experienced three earthquakes of Mw5.0 or greater in 2016: the 13-Feb. Fairview earthquake (Mw5.1), the 03-Sep. Pawnee earthquake (Mw5.8), and the 07-Nov. Cushing earthquake (Mw5.0). These events are the first earthquakes in the state exceeding Mw5.0 since the 2011 Mw5.7 Prague earthquake and likely result from wide-scale deep fluid-injection. We use interferometric synthetic...

To standardize parameters used in seismometer testing and calibration and to make these algorithms accessible to the seismological community, we have developed a new seismometer testing software package called Albuquerque Seismological Laboratory (ASL) Sensor Test Suite. This software is written in Java and makes use of Seismological Exchange for Earthquake Data (SEED) format. Our goal...

The 30 November 2017 Delaware earthquake with magnitude MW 4.2 occurred beneath the northeastern tip of the Delmarva Peninsula near Dover, Delaware. The earthquake and its aftershocks provide an opportunity to evaluate seismicity in a passive margin setting using much improved coverage by high-quality permanent broadband seismometers at regional distance ranges in the central and eastern...

Consistent relations between shallow landslide initiation and associated rainfall characteristics remain difficult to identify, due largely to the complex hydrological and geological processes causing slopes to be predisposed to failure and those processes that subsequently trigger failures. Considering the importance of hillslope hydrology for rainfall-induced landsliding, we develop...

Significant uncertainty remains concerning how and where crustal shortening occurs throughout the eastern Cascade Range in Washington State. Using light detection and ranging (lidar) imagery, we identified an ∼5‐km‐long lineament in Swakane canyon near Wenatchee, roughly coincident with a strand of the Entiat fault. Topographic profiles across the lineament reveal a southwest‐side‐up...

Most regional landslide warning systems utilize empirically derived rainfall thresholds that are difficult to improve without recalibration to additional landslide events. To address this limitation, we explored the use of synthetic rainfall to generate thousands of possible storm patterns and coupled them with a physics‐based hydrology and slope stability model for various antecedent...

Surficial mass movements, such as debris avalanches, rock falls, lahars, pyroclastic flows, and outburst floods, are a dominant hazard at many volcanoes worldwide. Understanding these processes, cataloging their spatio-temporal occurrence, and detecting, tracking, and characterizing these events would advance the science of volcano monitoring and help mitigate hazards. Seismic and...

Earthquake-based models of slab geometry are limited by the distribution of earthquakes within a subducting slab, which is often heterogeneous. The fast seismic velocity signature of slabs in tomography studies is independent of the distribution of earthquakes within the slab, providing a critical constraint on slab geometry when earthquakes are absent. In order to utilize this...

The 2014 update of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Seismic Hazard Model (NSHM) for the conterminous United States (2014 NSHM; Petersen and others, 2014, 2015) included probabilistic ground motion maps for 2 percent and 10 percent probabilities of exceedance in 50 years, derived from seismic hazard curves for peak ground acceleration (PGA) and 0.2 and 1.0 second spectral...

Earthquake-triggered landslides are a significant hazard in seismically active regions, but our ability to assess the hazard they pose in near real-time is limited. In this study, we present a new globally applicable model for seismically induced landslides based on the most comprehensive global dataset available; we use 23 landslide inventories that span a range of earthquake magnitudes...

Unsaturated zone flow processes are an important focus of landslide hazard estimation. Differences in soil hydraulic behavior between wetting and drying conditions (i.e., hydraulic hysteresis) may be important in landslide triggering. Hydraulic hysteresis can complicate soil hydraulic parameter estimates and impact prediction capability. This investigation focused on hydraulic property...

Great megathrust earthquakes arise from the sudden release of energy accumulated during centuries of interseismic plate convergence. The moment deficit (energy available for future earthquakes) is commonly inferred by integrating the rate of interseismic plate locking over the time since the previous great earthquake. But accurate integration requires knowledge of how interseismic plate...