Lawinenforschung

In October, the world's largest conference for snow and avalanches will take place in Innsbruck for the first time. There will also be an open day - ideal for interested winter sports enthusiasts!

The Winter Report 2016/17 of the WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF is online as a pdf. The review of the weather, snow cover and avalanche danger was already published in summer 2017, and the report has now been supplemented with a description of selected avalanche accidents.

Sliding snow avalanches cannot be triggered by a regular additional load - neither as a skier nor as a blaster. Why is that the case?

Around 60 people are sitting in the seminar room of a Davos hotel. They include mountain guides, safety officers from municipalities and cantons, natural hazard experts from the Swiss Federal Railways and blasting experts and slope maintenance staff from various ski resorts. Lukas Duerr, avalanche warning officer at the SLF, asks the group: "What does serious danger actually mean?"

While the first big snowfalls of the season are causing a stir here in Germany, dozens of volunteers are mercilessly trampling the first snow of the winter in Aspen. Shoes and trouser legs wrapped in Ducktape, they march through the freshly snow-covered terrain to prevent the early season snow from becoming an old snow problem.

ORF reports: "The winter weather is forcing changes to the supersonic training of army fighter pilots. The noise of their exercises could trigger avalanches in the snow-covered high Alps. The flights have been moved to the north and north-east of Austria."

The International Snow Science Workshop (ISSW) takes place every two years, alternating between the USA, Canada and Europe. The last ISSW was held in Breckenridge, Colorado, in October 2016. The ISSW is the largest scientific conference on snow and avalanches and offers snow researchers from various disciplines the opportunity to get together. Over the next few weeks, we will be taking a closer look at the findings presented there. We start with some news on the topics of model chains, fracture mechanics and avalanche detection.

An analysis of the data on avalanche victims in Switzerland shows: The number of victims in secured terrain has decreased significantly over the last 80 years. In open terrain, it fell after a peak in the 1980s and has remained relatively constant since then - despite more snow sports enthusiasts off-piste.

I have a cell phone with me when I'm skiing, if only for safety reasons. Of course, taking pictures and listening to music on your smartphone isn't bad either. Sometimes I take a helmet camera with me, or maybe a real camera, or both, or an MP3 player, or a GPS, or a radio, or something else from the electronic fleet that many of us have at home. Unfortunately, none of this really works well with the avalanche transceiver. Why is that and what should I look out for?

The human factor receives surprisingly little attention in current avalanche research. So-called "soft facts", such as group dynamics during freeriding or touring, are hardly studied scientifically. Benjamin Zweifel from the WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF is one of the few people working on this aspect of avalanche research. In this context, he is also supervising Nicholas Wolken's diploma thesis together with Dr. Reinhard Tschiesner from the University of Bolzano.

After a number of interesting and sometimes innovative books on the subject of avalanches have been published in recent winters - such as the book by Nairz/Mair on hazard patterns - a new avalanche book has now also been published by the renowned mountain publisher Rother: "Lawinen: Verstehen - Vermeiden - Praxistipps". The author is long-time ski tourer, mountain rescuer and physicist Eike Roth.