New research indicates that over 100,000 landslides were triggered by a single rainstorm.
Back in July 2023, the remnants of Typhoon Doksuri swept across northern China, bringing exceptional rainfall. I briefly covered this at the time, but there was a lack of clear information about the impacts.
A technical note has been published in the journal Landslides in the last few days (Xie et al. 2026) [this link should allow you to access the paper behind the paywall), which provides greater clarity on what occurred. And the picture is remarkable.
The authors have undertaken detailed mapping of the landslides triggered by Typhoon Doksuri, identifying 104,555 landslides. The authors describe this as “the largest rainfall-induced landslide event in North China to date”.
To give an idea if the scale of this event, the image below shows just a small part of the affected area, centred on [39.9530, 116.04518]. This is a Planet Labs image captured on 25 July 2023, just before the rainfall:-
And here is the same area after Typhoon Doksuri:-
And here is a slider to allow the images to be compared:-
The situation will be familiar to regular readers of this blog – intense rainfall has triggered multiple shallow landslides in steep terrain, which have then coalesced to form channelised debris flows with high mobility and a long runout. Note the way that these debris flows have entered the populated area – in some cases the damage looks very serious:-
These landslides were triggered by extreme rainfall – Xie et al. (2026) suggest that some areas received over 400 mm in a seven day period, and over 200 mm in 24 hours.
It was not the aim of this paper to consider the cost of these landslides, but this must have been substantial. A paper in Mandarin (Yang et al. 2023) on the meteorology of this event notes that:
“According to incomplete statistics (as of August 10, 2023), the continuous heavy rainfall affected 3.8886 million people in 110 counties (cities, districts) of Hebei Province, causing direct economic losses of 95.811 billion yuan, 29 deaths, and 16 missing persons. It is necessary to review and summarize the precipitation characteristics and weather causes of this event to provide a reference for forecasting extreme torrential rainstorms in North China.”
This translates to US$13.7 billion.
References
Xie, C., Huang, Y., Xu, C. et al. 2026. Over 100,000 landslides triggered by typhoon-induced rainfall in North China in July 2023. Landslides. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-026-02698-w
Yang, X. et al. 2023. Evolution characteristics and formation of the July 2023 severe torrential rain on the eastern foothills of Taihang mountains in Hebei Province.
Meteorological Monthly, 49, 1451-1467. (in Chinese). https://doi.org/10.7519/j.issn.1000-0526.2023.102301
Thanks as ever to the kind people at Planet Labs for providing access to their amazing imagery.