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Natural Hazards

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The West Hills of Portland, in the southern Tualatin Mountains, trend northwest along the west side of Portland, Oregon. These silt-mantled mountains receive significant wet-season precipitation and are prone to sliding during wet conditions, occasionally resulting in significant property damage or casualties. In an effort to develop a baseline for interpretive analysis of the groundwater response to rainfall, an automated monitoring system was installed in 2006 to measure rainfall, pore-water pressure, soil suction, soil-water potential, and volumetric water content at 15-minute intervals. The data show a cyclical pattern of groundwater and moisture content levels—wet from October to May and dry between June and...
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The database contains uniformly processed ground motion intensity measurements (peak horizontal ground motions and 5-percent-damped pseudospectral accelerations for oscillator periods 0.1–10 s). The earthquake event set includes more than 3,800 M≥3 earthquakes in Oklahoma and Kansas from January 2009 to December 2016. Ground motion time series were collected out to 500 km. We also relocated the majority of the earthquake hypocenters using a multiple-event relocation algorithm to produce a set of near-uniformly processed hypocentral locations. Details about data processing are reported in the accompanying article. First posted - October 11, 2017 Revised - December 18, 2017, ver. 1.1
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Wildfire can significantly alter the hydrologic response of a watershed to the extent that even modest rainstorms can produce dangerous flash floods and debris flows. The USGS conducts post-fire debris-flow hazard assessments for select fires in the Western U.S. We use geospatial data related to basin morphometry, burn severity, soil properties, and rainfall characteristics to estimate the probability and volume of debris flows that may occur in response to a design storm.
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The files consist of two types: tabulated data files and graphical map files. Data files consist of six .csv files, representing six experiment dates (2016_06_14, 2016_16_15, 2016_18_15, 2016_16_21, 2016_16_22, 2016_16_23). Each of these files contains multiple columns of data, with each column representing either a time measurement or the value of a physical quantity measured at that time (e.g., flow depth, pore pressure, normal stress, etc.). Map files consist of six .pdf files, each representing an experiment date listed above. The maps show the thickness of the sediment deposited onto the runout pad after each experiment. Sediment thickness was determined using photogrammetery software from Adam Technology.
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Bathymetry and topography data from the Elwha River delta, Washington, May 2011
Two dams on the Elwha River, Washington State, USA trapped over 20 million m3 of sediment, reducing downstream sediment fluxes and contributing to erosion of the river's coastal delta. The removal of the Elwha and Glines Canyon dams between 2011 and 2014 induced massive increases in river sediment supply and provided an unprecedented opportunity to examine the response of a delta system to changes in sediment supply. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) developed an integrated research program aimed at understanding the ecosystem responses following dam removal. The research program included repeated surveys of beach topography, nearshore bathymetry, and surface sediment grain size to quantify changes in delta morphology...
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