Gigi Pavur Named an AGU Grand Prize Winner for Mapping Landslide Risk in Central America
Gigi Pavur, a 2019 DEVELOP participant and former NASA Headquarters intern, is one of eight grand prize winners of the 2019 American Geophysical Union (AGU) Data Visualization and Storytelling Competition for her DEVELOP team’s landslide susceptibility mapping project. The project helps identify potential landslides in the Dominican Republic and surrounding Caribbean islands in near real-time. Pavur, along with team members Sarah Aldama, Chelsea Dandridge and Kyung “Robin” Kim, worked with two government agencies in the Dominican Republic — Servicio Geológico Nacional (SGN) and Oficina Nacional de Meteorología (ONAMET) — to create local landslide susceptibility maps using NASA Earth observations. Once the maps were created, the team provides them as inputs to a computer model that assesses the probability of a landslide happening. Insurance companies, international aid organizations, emergency response groups and others use this NASA computer model, called the Landslide Hazard Assessment for Situational Awareness (LHASA), to independently monitor near real-time...