An open-source application software for spatial prediction of permanent displacements in earthquake-induced landslides by the Newmark sliding block method: pyNewmarkDisp

Abstract

This paper presents pyNewmarkDisp, an open-source application software developed in Python for calculating the spatial distribution of permanent displacements (up) in earthquake-triggered shallow landslides through the Newmark sliding block method. up are often estimated by simplified methods using empirical correlations instead of the direct Newmark method in which ground motion accelerations exceeding a critical value are integrated twice. These simplified procedures have traditionally been justified because of the time consumption, labor intensiveness, and impracticality of the direct Newmark method at large spatial scales. However, pyNewmarkDisp has a well-optimized code taking advantage of NumPy array operations and just-in-time Numba compilation that allows performing the direct Newmark method at large-scale spatial domains, even on general-purpose computers. pyNewmarkDisp is exemplified through a hypothetical study case, and its results are compared to three empirical correlations, showing significant differences and confirming that simplified methods can lead to inaccurate results.