LR: Avalanche warning in Austria is a matter for the federal states. There is an avalanche warning service in seven out of nine federal states. How long has your LWD actually existed and how did it come about?
AS: In Styria, the avalanche warning service has existed since 1975 - at the same time as the Disaster Prevention Act. However, the avalanche winter of 1999 provided a major innovation boost, not only in our region but in the entire Alpine region. This led to intensive work on setting up automatic weather stations and the introduction of daily avalanche reports. A precarious avalanche situation at the beginning of February 2006 and a wet snow situation in 2009 provided a similar impetus with a further push to expand the stations.
The avalanche warning service at the ZAMG in Graz has six avalanche warning officers and two technicians. Since 2006, we have also been responsible for avalanche warning in Lower Austria. There are always two avalanche forecasters on duty at the same time. In the meantime, the others can concentrate on scientific projects, in which we are very closely involved.
Since the 2020/21 season, the avalanche warning services for Salzburg, Upper Austria, Lower Austria, Styria and Carinthia have had the same look and feel. The graphic presentation has been standardized and the avalanche reports have been raised to a new level in several respects. This is exactly in line with the much-discussed topic of the convergence of avalanche warning products across political borders. How long have you been working on this project, what hurdles have you faced and what are the benefits for winter sports enthusiasts?
The joint avalanche warning system arose from a previous project with Carinthia and Slovenia that started back in 2017. Before the first corona lockdown in 2020, we then started to focus on standardization within the Austrian federal states.
The advantages are the multilingualism and the graphically uniform appearance. But also the ability for winter sports enthusiasts to see the bigger picture: on the Upper Austrian LWD website, for example, someone from Linz can see at a glance that the avalanche situation is currently better in Lungau. There are no longer any hard boundaries between the avalanche warning services across administrative borders, as the hazard level maps of the neighboring federal states are also included.
In addition, we can now aggregate various small regions into a common warning region on a daily basis. Depending on the weather and avalanche situation, the avalanche warning can be fine-tuned for each individual micro-region.
