Unit 1: Monitoring Volcanic Activity at Mount St. Helens
How can data from an impending volcanic dome-building event be used to forecast the hazard to a surrounding community? In this activity, students will examine geodetic data (GPS and lidar) and seismic data in a ...

Indiana River Meanders Mapping Exercise
In Indiana, major rivers and their tributaries cross much of the state. These rivers can produce significant hazards related to flooding and erosion, which threaten nearby residents and infrastructure. Rivers are ...

Topographic differencing: Earthquake along the Wasatch fault
After a big earthquake happens people ask, 'Where did the earthquake occur? How big was it? What type of fault was activated?' We designed an undergraduate laboratory exercise in which students learn how ...

Unit 2: Examining the Distribution of Mass Wasting Events
What factors contribute to the distribution patterns of mass wasting events? In this unit, students will use a frequency-ratio method, one of the most common quantitative methods used in the statistical analysis of ...

Karst Hydrogeology: A virtual field introduction using Google Earth and GIS
Students will have the opportunity to select and virtually explore the hydrogeology and geomorphology of a karst landscape using Google Earth, lidar data-sourced DEM(s) and geologic maps, and GIS software (QGIS) ...

Working with Point Clouds in CloudCompare and Classifying with CANUPO
This exercise will walk you through 1) basic operations and use in CloudCompare, and 2) use of an Open-Source plugin in CloudCompare called CANUPO (http://nicolas.brodu.net/en/recherche/canupo/) that allows for ...

Unit 3: Channel Capacity and Manning's Equation
A flood occurs when the flow rate in a river exceeds the capacity of a channel to transmit water downstream within its banks. How much water can a channel transmit? Answering this question requires measurements of ...

Unit 4: Hydraulic Modeling and Flood Inundation Mapping using HEC-RAS
The flow or discharge value in a river does not mean much to a layperson or a decision maker because this flow can be insignificant on a big river but can be dangerous on a small creek. Thus, we must know how to ...

Landslide Mapping and Analysis
The purpose of this module is to familiarize students to empirical methods of mass movement hazard analysis, to provide them training in mapping and analyzing inventories of landslides from lidar datasets, and to ...

Unit 6 Hazards and Risk at Convergent Plate Boundaries (Day 2 of activity)
In this two-day activity, students monitor a simulated evolving volcanic crisis at a convergent plate boundary (Cascadia). Using monitoring data and geologic hazard maps, students make a series of forecasts for the ...