Application of Data-Driven Techniques For Landslide Susceptibility Prediction Along An Earthquake Affected Road Section in Kashmir Himalaya

The interaction of seismic events with geo-environmental conditions and anthropogenic activities may exacerbate the risk of landslide hazard in a mountainous region. As an example of this, 2005 Kashmir earthquake triggered a large number of shallow to deep slope failures, which was further intensified in following years by human activities notably along road networks, posing a long-term hazard. Hence, this study was planned to evaluate the effectiveness of landslide susceptibility prediction along earthquake affected road-section of Neelum Highway using six different data-driven models. We applied analytical hierarchy process as heuristic approach, weight of evidence and index of entropy as statistical models and multi-layer perceptron, support vector machine and binary logistic regression (BLR) as machine learning models. Initially, 224 landslides locations were marked through field surveys to prepare landslide inventory which was further randomly divided into training (70%) and testing (30%) datasets. Then, 13 landslide causative factors (LCFs) were extracted from geo-spatial database and analysed by measuring collinearity among factors and assessing their contribution in landslide occurrence using different feature selection methods for inclusion in susceptibility modelling. Thereafter, six employed models were trained to produced landslide susceptibility maps of investigated road-section. Finally, the area under receiver operating characteristics (AU-ROC) curve and various statistical measures were applied to validate and compare the performance of modeled landslide susceptibility. The results revealed that no collinearity issue exists among all 13 LCFs, and all six models exhibited satisfying performance in predicting landslide susceptibility of study area. However, BLR model have produced most promising and optimum results as compared to other models with AU-ROC (0.881), Matthew’s correlation coefficient (0.609), Kappa coefficient (0.604), accuracy (0.797) and F-score (0.787). The outcomes of this study can be used as pertinent guide for preventing and managing the landslide disaster risk along Neelum Highway and beyond.

Creepex-analysis of processes in focal zones of large earthquakes by means of GIS-ENDDB

The creepex (creep & explosion) parameter provides information on the relation between low- and high-frequency radiation components in the earthquake source and has become a physically meaningful tool for analyzing various aspects of seismogenesis, in particular, the diagnostics of the preparation processes and the its aftershocks activity of a strong event. This paper investigates the spatial-temporal dynamics of creepex in the focal zones of a number of the major earthquakes from the plate convergence regions, including continental Kashmir earthquake (08.10.2005, MS=7.6) and continental-oceanic Tohoku (11.03.2011, Mw=8.7). One of the goals of this work is to demonstrate the capabilities of the method in studying physically grounded patterns of focal zones development at the first hours after the main shock. Because of this study, the following regularities of the source relaxation process were revealed: the partiality of the aftershock process, positive values of the creepex at its first hours (explained by the influence of the dilatancy process), and abrupt changes in the creepex during deep transitions (explained by the thermodynamic effect and by the increase in pressure with depth).

National Disaster Management Act, 2010 of Pakistan: A Review

Introduction: Pakistan has suffered from the worst ever natural and artificial disasters in its history since the start of this century. These disasters caused widespread loss of life, property, and resources; moreover, a high level of social and psychological imbalance was also experienced. The only law available in the country to handle disaster situations was response-oriented, and in the aftermath of the Kashmir earthquake in 2005, the government was forced to review its laws dealing with disasters. To provide a complete spectrum of Disaster Risk Management (DRM) at national level, National Disaster Management Ordinance (NDMO) was promulgated in 2006. NDMO was ratified by the parliament naming it as National Disaster Management Act (NDM Act), 2010 of Pakistan with the purpose to reduce the risks and manage the future disaster situations effectively and efficiently. The purpose of this paper is to review in detail the (NDM Act), 2010 of Pakistan and ascertain the limitations with a view to proffer necessary recommendations. Methods: The study is based on secondary data and detail review of NDM Act 2010, of Pakistan. Discussion: The detail study of NDM Act, 2010 reveals that the Act was either prepared in haste or by a team lacking the requisite expertise on the subject due to certain glaring ambiguities within the contents of various sections. Initially the Act appears to be reactive in nature as there is no mention of disaster risk reduction measures. Lack of accountability mechanism makes the implementation phase susceptible to deviant workplace behaviors. Details of financial allocations for the lower level disaster management authorities (district, union and town), who are the initial responders have been missed out. Conclusion: Owing to lack of political and economic constraints supplemented with corruption, the effectiveness of policies and plans formulated under the guidelines of NDM Act, 2010 will always remain doubtful. Thus, the early revision of NDM Act, 2010 of Pakistan is recommended.

Strain accumulation along various faults in the Kashmir Himalaya from InSAR

<p>We are using InSAR time-series analysis to measure the interseismic deformation across various faults of the Kashmir Himalaya. Active faults reaching the surface include the Main Boundary Faults, Bagh-Balakot Fault, which ruptured in the 2005 Kashmir earthquake (Mw 7.6), Jhelum Fault, Reasi Thrust and intra-Kashmir basin faults. We concentrate on these shallow faults that are closest to the people living in Kashmir. The Main Boundary Faults and other faults likely connect to the Main Himalayan Thrust (MHT) that is the plate-boundary megathrust beneath Kashmir and the rest of the Himalayas. The MHT has been suggested as a possible source for Mw 8 to Mw 8.5 earthquakes in this area. We have processed interferometric pairs from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency ALOS-2 L-band (24 cm wavelength) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) wide-swath (ScanSAR) data acquired between 2015 and 2020. Initial interferometric SAR (InSAR) processing was carried out using the alos2App application of the InSAR Scientific Computing Environment (ISCE2) package, with ionospheric corrections enabled. We found that many scenes acquired in the winter form pairs that have low coherence due to snow cover in the High Himalayas and Pir Panjal Range. We also found that phase unwrapping in the mountains was improved by taking 10 range and 56 azimuth looks from the full-aperture ScanSAR for an effective resolution of about 200 meters. We are running a co-registered stack processing of the ALOS-2 SAR data, with self-consistent ionospheric corrections estimated using the split-spectrum method, using the new alosStack application of ISCE2 package to carry out time-series InSAR analysis, using an open-source Python toolbox, MIntPy.</p>

Comparing the agenda setting role of the Pakistani and Indian newspapers in disasters: a case study of the 2005 Kashmir earthquake

In the aftermath of the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, the media played a central role in linking victims to the government apparatus and the national and international community and highlighting weaknesses in the disaster management process. This study was conducted to analyze and compare the ‘agenda setting role’ of the Pakistani newspapers with that of the Indian newspapers after the 2005 Kashmir earthquake with a magnitude of 7.6 and resulting in over 78,000 fatalities in Azad Jammu & Kashmir, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan and the Indian part of Kashmir. Two Pakistani and two Indian newspapers each with high circulation were selected for qualitative and quantitative analysis. A total of 630 articles were downloaded for analysis out of which 120 front page articles were finally analyzed with the help of five selected themes including extent of damage, phases of disaster, responsibility issues, types of framing and focus on disaster policies. The study revealed that there was a strong agenda setting role of both Pakistani and Indian newspapers in post 2005 Kashmir earthquake. The newspapers focused on broad policy issues using thematic framing techniques with a strong emphasis on response phase, whereas the least attention has been given to preparedness and mitigation strategies. The analysis further revealed that in both the countries, federal government was considered to be responsible for disaster management system by both Pakistani and Indian newspapers and the Indian newspapers have also strongly criticized the Indian army for their unsatisfactory emergency response operations. Newspapers are still one of the most important sources of information in many developing countries including Pakistan and India and they can play a positive role in the management of natural disasters by focusing on mitigation and preparation to prepare communities for future disasters.