Open gridded climate datasets can help investigating the relation between meteorological anomalies and geomorphic hazards in mountainous areas

Abstract

The initiation of geomorphic hazards in mountainous environments is highly susceptible to temperature and precipitation forcing. To assess future changes in these hazards, statistical methods linking meteorological anomalies with the occurrence of past hazards can be employed. These methods are currently trained using long records from in-situ meteorological stations. This requires large efforts for data access, collection and homogenisation, which severely limit the scalability of these approaches. Here, we use a consolidated statistical method and a vast catalogue of geomorphic hazards occurred across the Alpine range to show that open-access datasets of gridded temperature and satellite-based precipitation estimates can be used as surrogates of in-situ observations. Further, we find that satellite data can capture precipitation anomalies leading to debris flows that are missed by in-situ observations.