Engineers in Norway have been working for several years to develop a computer model that can predict such catastrophes. But the mechanisms involved are complex, and modeling them involves quite a bit of research, trial and error. Metral’s Master’s thesis entailed testing the robustness of the engineers’ model by seeing how well it could replicate the 2009 and 2016 landslides. She performed back calculations, running the model based on the parameters used at the time to determine what the model would have predicted and what was still needed for an accurate prediction.
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