SLF

As always, PowderAlert is about the existential things in life. To be or not to be; to ski or to stay at home. Decisions of Shakespearean proportions are on the agenda.

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 unsettled weather continues for the time being. After the very warm weekend, temperatures have now dropped back to a level appropriate for the time of year and the April weather is living up to its reputation with a mix of showers, clouds and a few hours of sunshine.

With White Risk, the SLF has been offering a very comprehensive and intuitive license-based e-learning tool for avalanche prevention for many years. In the 2016/17 season, the tool will be presented in a completely revised version. We tried out the tour planning features on a ski tour in Brandnertal.

There is now a wealth of popular scientific works on the internet that are relatively easy to understand. Finding these is usually the greater challenge. A collection that can be expanded at will:

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?

White Risk is a four-language, web-based avalanche prevention platform (www.whiterisk.ch) and consists of the EXPLORE, LEARN, TOUR and PRO modules. The platform is a comprehensive interactive reference work on avalanche awareness and also includes a tour planning tool (TOUR) with a link to the mobile app.

The leaflet "Attention Avalanche" is a foldable flyer to take away, which is used during training and can be consulted as a reminder and mental aid in the terrain and when planning tours. The leaflet has been revised and reissued. You can download it free of charge here (print, fold, insert...).

Both the Austrian avalanche warning services and the SLF have now made their full seasonal reports available to download online. In both countries, the warmer than average 2015/16 winter season only really began at the start of 2016. The number of fatal avalanche accidents was slightly below the long-term average. In Austria, 14 people lost their lives in avalanches last winter, compared to 20 in Switzerland.

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.

Avalanche rescue has made great progress in recent decades because new rescue and communication technologies are being used more and more frequently by off-piste skiers, ski tourers and rescuers.

In a recently published study by the University of Neuchâtel and the SLF (WSL), snow depth data from 11 weather stations in the Swiss Alps were examined. The stations are located in an altitude range between 1139 and 2450 m and the time series go back to 1970. The duration of snow cover has decreased at all 11 stations, whereby the earlier melting of the snow cover in spring is reflected in the statistics.