Anomalous winter-snow-amplified earthquake-induced disaster of the 2015 Langtang avalanche in Nepal

Fujita, Koji; Inoue, Hiroshi; Izumi, Takeki; Yamaguchi, Satoru; Sadakane, Ayako; Sunako, Sojiro; Nishimura, Koichi; Immerzeel, Walter W.; Shea, J. M.; Kayastha, Rijan Bhakta; Sawagaki, Takanobu; Breashears, David F.; Yagi, Hiroshi; Sakai, Akiko

doi:10.5194/nhess-17-749-2017

Cited by 44 publications

(58 citation statements)

References 19 publications

(29 reference statements)

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“…Previous studies have shown the good performance of adding a conceptual representation of the storage and drainage in the glaciers within glaciohydrological models (e.g., Jansson et al, 2003;Hock and Jansson, 2006). The most widely adopted approach is based on a reservoir or a cascade of reservoirs with time-invariant parameters (e.g., Farinotti et al, 2012;Zhang et al, 2015;Hanzer et al, 2016;Gao et al, 2017). Here, storage of liquid water inside glaciers was implemented by adding an englacial porous layer between the glacier and the bedrock allowing the liquid water storage within the glacier.…”

Section: Glacier Parameterizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantification of different flow components in a high-altitude glacierized catchment (Dudh Koshi, Himalaya): some cryospheric-related issues

Mimeau¹,

Estèves²,

Zin³

et al. 2019

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

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Abstract. In a context of climate change and water demand growth, understanding the origin of water flows in the Himalayas is a key issue for assessing the current and future water resource availability and planning the future uses of water in downstream regions. Two of the main issues in the hydrology of high-altitude glacierized catchments are (i) the limited representation of cryospheric processes controlling the evolution of ice and snow in distributed hydrological models and (ii) the difficulty in defining and quantifying the hydrological contributions to the river outflow. This study estimates the relative contribution of rainfall, glaciers, and snowmelt to the Khumbu River streamflow (Upper Dudh Koshi, Nepal, 146 km2, 43 % glacierized, elevation range from 4260 to 8848 m a.s.l.) as well as the seasonal, daily, and sub-daily variability during the period 2012–2015 by using the DHSVM-GDM (Distributed Hydrological Soil Vegetation Model – Glaciers Dynamics Model) physically based glacio-hydrological model. The impact of different snow and glacier parameterizations was tested by modifying the snow albedo parameterization, adding an avalanche module, adding a reduction factor for the melt of debris-covered glaciers, and adding a conceptual englacial storage. The representation of snow, glacier, and hydrological processes was evaluated using three types of data (MODIS satellite images, glacier mass balances, and in situ discharge measurements). The relative flow components were estimated using two different definitions based on the water inputs and contributing areas. The simulated hydrological contributions differ not only depending on the used models and implemented processes, but also on different definitions of the estimated flow components. In the presented case study, ice melt and snowmelt contribute each more than 40 % to the annual water inputs and 69 % of the annual stream flow originates from glacierized areas. The analysis of the seasonal contributions highlights that ice melt and snowmelt as well as rain contribute to monsoon flows in similar proportions and that winter outflow is mainly controlled by the release from the englacial water storage. The choice of a given parametrization for snow and glacier processes, as well as their relative parameter values, has a significant impact on the simulated water balance: for instance, the different tested parameterizations led to ice melt contributions ranging from 42 % to 54 %. The sensitivity of the model to the glacier inventory was also tested, demonstrating that the uncertainty related to the glacierized surface leads to an uncertainty of 20 % for the simulated ice melt component.

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Section: Glacier Parameterizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantification of different flow components in a high-altitude glacierized catchment (Dudh Koshi, Himalaya): some cryospheric-related issues

Mimeau¹,

Estèves²,

Zin³

et al. 2019

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

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“…Cyclone Hudhud in October 2015 caused a disaster that killed more than 50 people within 2 days in the Annapurna and Manaslu regions in Nepal as a result of sudden snowfall and avalanches (Sherpa et al 2017). Anomalous winter snow accumulation also amplified the earthquake-induced disaster that killed more than 350 people and destroyed the entire village of Langtang in Nepal in 2015 (Fujita et al 2017).…”

Section: Disservices: Cryosphere-related Disastersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contributions of the cryosphere to mountain communities in the Hindu Kush Himalaya: a review

et al. 2019

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There is a growing recognition of the contribution of the cryosphere to human societies. This is especially important in the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH), where poverty and vulnerability are high and climate change impacts on the cryosphere are strong. However, there is a lack of synthesized knowledge about the contributions of the cryosphere to high mountain communities. This paper uses a cryosphere service framework-a derivative of the ecosystem service concept-to classify different goods and services provided by the cryosphere. Case studies were selected using an adapted systematic review methodology. These studies were then synthesized and examined through the lens of critical political ecology. The review shows that while the cryosphere provides a whole range of goods and services for mountain communities, not all of these are well documented. Material services like the supply of water for irrigation and agriculture, and disservices such as disasters, are better documented than non-material services like the spirituality of landscapes. The majority of the case studies do not use an interdisciplinary lens. While some studies on irrigation discuss the physical basis and human organization of irrigation, the literature on disasters mostly focuses on the physical processes and at most generalized loss and damage assessments. Further, most case studies do not use the critical epistemologies needed to examine how politics, power, and intersectionality influence societal responses to changes in the cryosphere. The paper suggests that future studies adopt interdisciplinary collaboration to understand human impacts and adaptive responses through critical political ecology frameworks.

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“…This event consisted of multiple phenomena and was described as a "disaster within a disaster" (Kargel et al, 2015). The sediment deposition consists mostly of accumulated snow and, to a lesser extent, of glacier ice (Fujita et al, 2017). Satellite-based thermal infrared observation conducted 5 days after the quake revealed that the deposition had a 10-20 K lower surface temperature than the surrounding terrain (Kargel et al, 2015).…”

Section: Avalanche Eventmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The water stream of the Langtang river was blocked once by the deposition but quickly recovered as the ice and snow deposition melted (Kargel et al, 2015). The materials near the riverbed had less boulder-and sand-rich deposition, suggesting that they originated from a snow avalanche (Fujita et al, 2017). From the sediment volume and catchment area on the mountain hill, the original snow depth before the avalanche occurrence was estimated at 1.82 m in the catchment hillslopes (Fujita et al, 2017).…”

Section: Avalanche Eventmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A great earthquake of 7.8 Mw, namely the 2015 Gorkha Earthquake, occurred in the district of Lamjung, central Nepal, on 25 April 2015 (Ge et al, 2015;Parameswaran et al, 2015), causing more than 9000 deaths and injuring 23 000 people (Roy et al, 2015). Damage in urban areas especially affected stone and brick masonry structures (Goda et al, 2015), whereas numerous landslides were induced in rural and mountain areas (ICIMOD, 2015a;Kargel et al, 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Multiple remote-sensing assessment of the catastrophic collapse in Langtang Valley induced by the 2015 Gorkha earthquake

Nagai

Tomii

Tadono

et al. 2017

Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci.

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Abstract. The main shock of the 2015 Gorkha Earthquake in Nepal induced numerous avalanches, rockfalls, and landslides in Himalayan mountain regions. A major village in the Langtang Valley was destroyed and numerous people were victims of a catastrophic avalanche event, which consisted of snow, ice, rock, and blast wind. Understanding the hazard process mainly depends on limited witness accounts, interviews, and an in situ survey after a monsoon season. To record the immediate situation and to understand the deposition process, we performed an assessment by means of satellite-based observations carried out no later than 2 weeks after the event. The avalanche-induced sediment deposition was delineated with the calculation of decreasing coherence and visual interpretation of amplitude images acquired from the Phased Array-type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar-2 (PALSAR-2). These outline areas are highly consistent with that delineated from a high-resolution optical image of WorldView-3 (WV-3). The delineated sediment areas were estimated as 0.63 km2 (PALSAR-2 coherence calculation), 0.73 km2 (PALSAR-2 visual interpretation), and 0.88 km2 (WV-3). In the WV-3 image, surface features were classified into 10 groups. Our analysis suggests that the avalanche event contained a sequence of (1) a fast splashing body with an air blast, (2) a huge, flowing muddy mass, (3) less mass flowing from another source, (4) a smaller amount of splashing and flowing mass, and (5) splashing mass without flowing on the east and west sides. By means of satellite-derived pre- and post-event digital surface models, differences in the surface altitudes of the collapse events estimated the total volume of the sediments as 5.51 ± 0.09  ×  106 m3, the largest mass of which are distributed along the river floor and a tributary water stream. These findings contribute to detailed numerical simulation of the avalanche sequences and source identification; furthermore, altitude measurements after ice and snow melting would reveal a contained volume of melting ice and snow.

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Anomalous winter-snow-amplified earthquake-induced disaster of the 2015 Langtang avalanche in Nepal

Cited by 44 publications

References 19 publications

Quantification of different flow components in a high-altitude glacierized catchment (Dudh Koshi, Himalaya): some cryospheric-related issues

Quantification of different flow components in a high-altitude glacierized catchment (Dudh Koshi, Himalaya): some cryospheric-related issues

Contributions of the cryosphere to mountain communities in the Hindu Kush Himalaya: a review

Multiple remote-sensing assessment of the catastrophic collapse in Langtang Valley induced by the 2015 Gorkha earthquake

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