A research center at the University of Kentucky, is studying weather and soil data through a monitoring network in eastern Kentucky, a region that is more prone to landslides, which can be disastrous to communities.

The system provides live updates from each installed station that are accessible to the public through an online mapping service.

Officials with the statewide Kentucky Geological Survey say this new tool can help keep Kentuckians safe.

This project came about through a grant from the National Science Foundation, through a program that they have called Peace Core and the name of this project is called climbs.

And what's really neat about it is that it's a statewide, multi-year university project that addresses, many aspects of science related to the climate, weather, and natural hazards.

Often, landslides are misunderstood.

So a landslide is a gravity driven, mass movement of rock and soil downslope.

And so they're really defined by what that material is, some combination of rock and soil and then how fast it moves.

We have 24 hydrologic clearing stations.

And they're all dispersed through ten counties in the Eastern Kentucky Coalfield.

So we wanted to capture slopes that were vulnerable to landslides.

And so we did that in, well, mainly by looking at our KGS maps, like looking at the landslide inventory that we have, our landslide susceptibility maps.

We also consider geology.

And we also looked at geo morphic setting.

So how high is it on this hill slope.

How low is it on the hill slope.

What direction is the hill slope facing things like that.

And also the steepness of the hill slope was also very important.

This network is measuring, soil moisture and what we call water potential.

Both of these things together.

Evaluate, sort of water content and wetting and drying behavior and soils on steep slopes.

And that matters, because that will tell us a lot about the conditions on the slopes that trigger landslides.

We know water is involved.

We know rainfall triggers landslides.

But what this is going to do is shed some light on the soil moisture conditions, perhaps at at the time landslides are initiated.

So the damage varies.

A lot of times it's it's compiled with, impact to roads and the damage to, to roads.

Landslides damage a lot of roads in Kentucky.

And that's costly.

It can damage property.

They can damage individual homes, residences, buildings.

This is relatively new.

There's not a lot of these kinds of networks.

And this is the first one we've had on slopes right now.

We have students who are working on this.

Brian is working on this.

We have students in civil engineering who are working on this and professors to, take this data and see what we can learn from it.

Can we use, data like this to, like, potentially be able to forecast landslides in the future, like we forecast the weather?

You know, can we forecast landslides?

You know, is is this storm more likely to predict or.

Excuse me, is this storm more likely to produce landslides because there was another big storm a week ago and the soils are already wet, for example.

Or are things so dry that even if this is a big storm, we probably won't get landslide?

Those are things we don't know yet.

So that's those are the things we're hoping to learn.

We're collecting years of data, like every 15 minutes, all of the data from these weather stations, from all the soil sensors.

So we're going to have a lot of data and, so we'll be able to do a lot more analysis with it to hopefully be able to better prepare for landslides in the future and prepare our communities, prepare our people so they have a little better idea of what to potentially expect.

This project comes after the devastating flooding in 2022 across eastern Kentucky, which triggered thousands of landslides.

Officials say landslides cost Kentucky around 20 to $30 million every year.