Field reconnaissance data from GEER investigation of the 2018 M(W) 7.5 Palu-Donggala earthquake

The M(w)7.5 Palu-Donggala earthquake occurred on 28 September 2018 and caused significant damage in Palu City and the surrounding Central Sulawesi region of Indonesia. The earthquake initiated a series of catastrophic landslides (classified as flowslides) [1,2], collapsed buildings, and generated tsunami waves that impacted Palu Bay's coast. The earthquake claimed over 4000 lives, making it the deadliest natural disaster of 2018. We performed a post-earthquake field reconnaissance and collected perishable data at the sites of five significant flowslides (named for the communities where they occurred: Balaroa, Petobo, Lolu Village, Jono Oge, and Sibalaya), as well as at other damage locations in the mesoseismal region. Our field team consisted of five U.S.-based members, who were sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation-supported Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance (GEER) organization [3], in collaboration with geologists, geotechnical engineers, and other researchers from Indonesia's Center for Earthquake Studies (PusGen) and the Indonesian Society of Geotechnical Engineers (HATTI) [this international team is collectively referred to as the Palu Earthquake “;GEER” team]. The GEER team arrived at Palu City on 13 November 2018 and conducted five days of extensive fieldwork using instrumentation from the Natural Hazards Reconnaissance Facility (known as the “RAPID”) [4,5], including mobile data collection software, digital imaging systems, high-resolution Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) antennas, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, or “;drones”). The resulting dataset includes over 2000 geotagged photographs, UAV images, ground coordinates, and other field measurements and observations, as well as associated post-processed geospatial data products (point clouds, digital surface models, orthomosaic images). Additionally, we used remote sensing data (i.e., pre- and post-event satellite imagery) to generate displacement vectors for over 1200 structures affected by the flowslides. The complete reconnaissance dataset is openly available on DesignSafe [6]. The data collected by the field team and subsequent mapping efforts, which document the morphology and patterns of movements of the flowslides, may be used by researchers studying liquefaction-induced flowslides. In addition, the displacement mapping provides a unique dataset for researchers who are calibrating and verifying simulation models of landslide displacements, or who are seeking a validation dataset for image correlation analysis (including machine learning routines). This dataset is associated with original research presented in “;East Palu Valley Flowslides Induced by the 2018 M(W) 7.5 Palu-Donggala Earthquake” [1] and also is the basis of research presented by Gallant et al. [2].