Post Gloria storm impact assessment in eastern Pyrenees (2020-02-28)

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Activation date: 2020-02-28 <br>
Event type: Wind storm <br>
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Activation reason: <br>
Between 22 and 23 January 2020, the Mediterranean storm "Gloria" hit Southern France. Possible effects and damages were flooding, damage to forest, soil instability, resulting in an increasing risk of landslides and soil erosion. The scope of the service request was to evaluate forest damage and its extent and to analyse the increase of soil erosion and landslide risk; to this end, three products were designed and generated.The soil erosion risk assessment was conducted based on a soil erodibility model applying the RUSLE equation to estimate the soil loss. The risk classes show the erosion susceptibility.The landslide risk was assessed applying the Weight-of-Evidence methodology, based on a landslide inventory. Landslide driving factors (e.g. slope, LULC) are weighted with their importance for landslides occurrence. The combined total weight of all factors was divided in five risk classes.The forest damage was determined by visual interpretation; the loss of biomass was calculated weighting the tree cover density, tree height and crown length factor into account. <br>
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