Rudi Mair

Rudi Mair from the LWD Tyrol is working as an avalanche forecaster for the 31st winter this year. The eloquent "avalanche expert", who is also well known in the less snow-loving part of society, talks about the development of the Tyrolean avalanche warning service, the biggest innovations of the last thirty years and whether he would return to his professional origins in the Antarctic in retirement.

Patrick Nairz has been an avalanche forecaster for the avalanche warning service in Tyrol for over 20 years and is a well-known face in the ski touring scene. Schneestöberer spoke to him about the 5 avalanche problems, his career, his most important contributions to avalanche prevention and about hunting for crusts in the snowpack.

Winter sports enthusiasts who enjoy being out in the open terrain benefit enormously from the free service of the daily avalanche situation report (LLB). During the winter months, Eliane Droemer found out how the situation report is created every day from over 200,000 pieces of data and observations in the terrain, what news there is from research and what experiences the team has in common during the first control flight of the 18/19 season with LWD Tirol in mid-December.

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!

We continue with the International Snow Science Workshop 2016 and the studies presented there: Having already dealt with some topics in Part 1 that have more to do with the nature of snow and avalanches, we now turn our attention to people and how they deal with avalanches. Avalanche reports and the authorities that issue them are extremely important for us as winter sports enthusiasts, but their job is not always easy. On the one hand, of course, because the snow doesn't always do what you might expect, and on the other because very complex issues have to be communicated as simply and intuitively as possible. What are the current issues here and how do you approach them?

The Tyrolean Avalanche Warning Service has polished up some of its additional services and optimized them for use with mobile devices. The situation report is now also available via WhatsApp.

Rudi Mair and Patrick Nairz are the avalanche warning experts from the Tyrolean Avalanche Warning Service. In their bestselling avalanche book "Avalanche. Die 10 entscheidenden Gefahrenmuster erkennen", the two avalanche experts present a new, complementary approach to avoiding avalanche accidents. When analyzing hundreds of mostly tragic avalanche accidents, Rudi and Patrick discovered that most accidents occur in typical, recurring hazard patterns. They therefore developed 10 typical, particularly accident-prone and frequent hazard patterns. Recognizing these avalanche hazard patterns should help winter sports enthusiasts to behave with appropriate caution – and thus avoid accidents. Here we present the 10 key hazard patterns in brief.

Yet another book about avalanche awareness, some will think when they hear about the new avalanche book by the two avalanche warning experts Rudi Mair and Patrick Nairz. That was certainly my first thought when I heard about the book. But when I read the book "Avalanche. Die 10 entscheidenden Gefahrenmuster erkennen" it quickly becomes clear that the approach to the subject of avalanches and avalanche risk in this book is completely different for the first time!