New Avalanche Tests and Techniques

I was recently down at the International Snow Science Workshop down in Telluride. It was a pretty good conferece with some wicked topics presented. Some of it was pretty theoretical but there was also a couple of new field tests that I thought are going to be really usefull so I wrote an article summerizing two of them - a new test for failure propigation and a strategy for digging out avalanche victims. The article is on Biglines:

http://www.biglines.com/articles_rea...le=1&read=3161

I think that it is really important to get this info out to everybody who hangs out in the mountains so I thought I would mention it here. Credit to Ron Simenhois, Karl Birkland and Bruce Edgerly for doing all the hard reasearch.

Good article dude, and the pictures are really helpful. It will be interesting to practise with these as well as the usual stability tests.

Hey man nice article and thanks for posting it.

the link to the original paper is broken in the article. here's one that works:

http://www.fsavalanche.org/NAC/techP..._Simenhois.pdf

thanks for fixing that f2f

is this the eirik I know? if it is I had no idea you went all the way to Telluride.
Nice work.
Interesting read. I'll definetly add those two ideas to the memory bank and start trying them out in practice.

Thanks for posting these. The thing by Edgerly was addressed many a moon ago by Peter Schaerer after an attempted rescue of a 4m+ burial in Flute Bowl circa 1987. Don't know if he ever formally presented this, but still very valuable information, so props to B.E. for bringing it to the avalanche community's attention, whether for the first time or not.

Yeah Athan... good to see you in cyber world.

Thanks for posting this Biglines article and the original paper. The ECT looks promising for producing a clear diffence in stable vs unstable fracture characteritics. Might be able to say goodby to the old "was that a light CT13 or a hard CT13" question.

Bookmarked this one.

Thanks for the info.

Thanks for the info. Our field director was there and was telling me about these. He also mentioned some interesting articles on false-positives in stability tests and the five lemons evaluation. I will post it when I find it or when he gets back from vacation and lets me see it.

That is cool and makes a lot of sense. Thanks for posting.

I presented the paper on "False-Stables" at the ISSW. Karl Birkeland and I did the research using the SnowPilot database. If your interested in the paper its at: http://www.fsavalanche.org/NAC/techP...alseStable.pdf
Additionally, the National Avalanche Center has a bunch of other relevant papers at: http://www.fsavalanche.org/NAC/techPages/techPap.html

Thanks for your interest!

Thanks so much Doug and keep up the good work.

I just read the paper on the Extended Column Test, very interesting and sounds promising. I'm a bit unclear on something though. The authors seem to use the difference from ECTI to ECTP as a distinct stable vs. unstable indicator. So ECT 13/14 is unstable while ECT 13/16 is stable. This is fairly straightforward, but they dont seem to comment on how far along in the process the column initiates/propagates. For example, what about ECT 7/8 vs ECT 22/23? Obviously traditional testing suggests that the column that fails as 7 is less stable than the column that fails at 22, but how are you supposed to integrate this into the Extended Column Test? In the compression test you might use easy, moderate, and hard as your stability descriptions, but how do you combine this with the ECT? I apologize ahead of time, if you havent read the article this may be sheer jibberish to you.

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Originally Posted by eirikainersharp

I was recently down at the International Snow Science Workshop down in Telluride. It was a pretty good conferece with some wicked topics presented. Some of it was pretty theoretical but there was also a couple of new field tests that I thought are going to be really usefull so I wrote an article summerizing two of them - a new test for failure propigation and a strategy for digging out avalanche victims. The article is on Biglines:

http://www.biglines.com/articles_rea...le=1&read=3161

I think that it is really important to get this info out to everybody who hangs out in the mountains so I thought I would mention it here. Credit to Ron Simenhois, Karl Birkland and Bruce Edgerly for doing all the hard reasearch.

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I too was at ISSW and I thought this presentation and Dougs were great. I have my big book of papers from there right behind me.

Interesting findings on both the failure propigation and the stragey for digging. I look forward to seeing these practiced and find out what results were concluded.

I was at the ESRI booth with Doug Scott, as well as sitting in on many sessions for the frist 2 days.

My company builds ultra rugged handhelds and we were getting a feeling on what snow science professionals use to gather all the data they use to be able to present these types of new techniques.

Many people are also wanting to now geo-reference their data and that is where WE are trying to come in. Handheld waterproof field computer for data enty and GPS, and then port said data to the PC.

One way vs. another:

http://tetongravity.com/forums/attac...1&d=1160088302



I talked with so many people I wanted to and missed a lot too.

I have a large thread (debate) with Halsted in the Slide Zone here as well.

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Originally Posted by Joey Joe Joe Junior Shabadoo

Thanks for the info. Our field director was there and was telling me about these. He also mentioned some interesting articles on false-positives in stability tests and the five lemons evaluation. I will post it when I find it or when he gets back from vacation and lets me see it.

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Just saw the false- positives paper. Anybody know where the Five lemons evaluation of snow profiles paper could be found? Is this the paper done by Bruce Jamieson?

And I have also spoken with Mark to port Snowpilot to a Windows Mobile 5 operating system to work with our Archer Field PC.

Conclusion is that is very costly to port, it is a free program and therefore we get back to a funding issue.

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Originally Posted by nesta

Just saw the false- positives paper. Anybody know where the Five lemons evaluation of snow profiles paper could be found? Is this the paper done by Bruce Jamieson?

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Ian McCammon.


http://www.snowpit.com/articles/lemo...int%20copy.pdf

http://www.mec.ca/Main/content_text....34374302881865

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Originally Posted by Buzzworthy

Ian McCammon.


http://www.snowpit.com/articles/lemo...int%20copy.pdf

http://www.mec.ca/Main/content_text....34374302881865

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Right! Sorry, I was thinking of Jamieson's Yellow Flag checklist for manual snow profiles, which is similar, and I found it at avalanche.ca
Can the Proceedings of the ISSW be found yet? When I googled ISSW all I got was the "upcoming" conference in Telluride

I have both those papers at home, I think...

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Originally Posted by wilcox510

I just read the paper on the Extended Column Test, very interesting and sounds promising. I'm a bit unclear on something though. The authors seem to use the difference from ECTI to ECTP as a distinct stable vs. unstable indicator. So ECT 13/14 is unstable while ECT 13/16 is stable. This is fairly straightforward, but they dont seem to comment on how far along in the process the column initiates/propagates. For example, what about ECT 7/8 vs ECT 22/23? Obviously traditional testing suggests that the column that fails as 7 is less stable than the column that fails at 22, but how are you supposed to integrate this into the Extended Column Test? In the compression test you might use easy, moderate, and hard as your stability descriptions, but how do you combine this with the ECT? I apologize ahead of time, if you havent read the article this may be sheer jibberish to you.

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Wilcox: from talking with Ron, the author of the paper, i got the understanding that the key to reading this test was simply looking at how quickly the failure propigateds across the column ie: in how many taps after it initally appears. This is what gives and indication of how likley a slab is to form and realease. Ron was categorizing results as either Stable or Unstable which is nice since it makes decision making easy. Obviously the further along in the test the failure is observed is going to give you some indication of the forces that are going to be needed to triger and avalanche, however how important is this information really if you already know that the slope is unstable. If you see that a failure can propigate but only at 9 from the shoulder I don't think it would be wise to think... okay, i'll ski this but I'm just not going to ski 'heavy'.

When I said I have both these papers at home... i ment I can email them to you if you PM me

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Originally Posted by nesta

Right! Sorry, I was thinking of Jamieson's Yellow Flag checklist for manual snow profiles, which is similar, and I found it at avalanche.ca
Can the Proceedings of the ISSW be found yet? When I googled ISSW all I got was the "upcoming" conference in Telluride

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Well, if you are looking for something specific, I do have the huge double phonebook looking book of all the papers. Can scan if needed.

ISSW did have some exta of these books containing all papers. Maybe contact them if they have more? Contact ISSW
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I have yet to find the new stuff on line quite yet, but some of it is starting to pop up here and there as evident by this thread.

I found some: Here.

I think they are planing to post pdf's of all the papers presented some time in the next couple of weeks. www.issw.info has all the old papers

thanks, that's what I was after, some of the newer stuff.