Avalanches

This is the project that I'm going to pursue! Kevin, you said this is my strongest pitch, and I agree. I also think that this is the pitch that has the best data source. It'll require me to clean it and combine it (it's separated by year and I want to analyze it over time). I'd also love to find a way to pick a few key standouts, and go back to the accident report to see if that would show me anything about that particular incident.

You said that I need to find questions and draw conclusions from this data. And I think I outlined that below, under "Things I need to learn." But to recap: Not all snowpacks are equal. The temperature and weather in Colorado creates a much more instable snowpack than in California (instability translating to a higher chance an avalanche will slide). But does that correlate with avalanche fatalities? Are there more fatalities in Colorado than in California? I'd also like to analyze these stats within the framework of heuristics, or the Human Factor. Beyond analyzing the snowpack, factors such as familiarity, group size, machismo go into avalanche risk. So I'm interested to find out what the average group size of parties involved in accidents is. And where they are, or if the location is a popular place to ski or somewhere farther off and harder to get to. Finally, I'd also like to find some data about backcountry ski equipment purchases, and see if there's a relationship between avalanche fatalities rising as more and more people buy backcountry gear. I could probably find the backcountry equipment finance data from SIA's industry business reports. http://www.snowsports.org/

This project would analyze avalanche statistics, searching for patterns and trends that would help people learn about avalanche safety and avoidance. This is becoming more relevant in the ski industry now because backcountry ski equipment is cheaper and more available now than ever before. Which means more people are skiing in the backcountry and are putting themselves at risk for getting caught in an avalanche.

Avalanche.org tracks every single avalanche in the country that has injured or killed a person. There is information about where the avalanche occured, who was involved, number of injuries and/or fatalities, and it links to the actual avalanche report filed by the local agency. My concern is that the information is compiled in a case-by-case scenario, and I don't know if it's something that I can pull a data file out of.

Powder Magazine's The Safe Zone. I currently work for Powder, managing their website. This is a project of ours that we hope to keep updated to educate our readers about avalanche safety and awareness. So I'm hoping this project could be something I could publish there. This map links to every single avalanche forecasting center in the United States, each of which would have people I could talk to about this.

Things I'd need to learn:

• Where do most avalanches happen? There are different kinds of snowpacks, depending on the region's weather patterns. They say that the continental snowpack, which is the snowpack in Colorado and the Rockies, is the most unstable. But does that translate to more skier-triggered incidents?
• How big are the groups in skier triggered avalanches? In a snow safety class, they recommend that you travel in groups of three. The bigger the group, the more your decision making is influenced, and that impacts your chances of getting caught in an avalanche. Do the numbers show that?
• Are avalanche fatalities going up as more people are going into the backcountry? The common thought is yes, but actually, last year saw a relatively low number of avalanche-related deaths. And the rate has stayed pretty constant. So I'd like to show that, too. And explore why.

Ski Injuries

I just wrote a story for Outside Online about common ski injuries. Torn ACLs is far and away the most common ski injury, and on a personal note, I've torn my ACL twice. When I was reporting for the story I found a group of three academics who have been studying ski injuries for 40 years at the base of Sugarbush Ski Area in Vermont. They work with the clinic and analyze every single injury that comes in. Today, they have a huge trove of data about injury trends, and they've published many papers about their findings. A few numbers I found in their reserach that are interesting:

• A skier's risk of ACL injury is 365 times higher than that of the general population.
• Among elite alpine skiers, knee injuries increased three fold from 1972 to the mid-90s
• In 2012, torn ACLs accounted for more than 17 percent of all ski injuries
• From the early 70s to the early 90s, the risk of sustaining a severe knee sprain increased by 240 percent, that's more than doubling the odds in just two decades.

Over 40 years, they've collected a lot of data. I'd like to explore and visualize these trends. And ask questions about what's causing these ski injuries, how they've changed, and what factors are involved.

There isn't a website from where I would pull these numbers. I'd have to ask this team, and I'm not sure if they'd give me their hard earned research. Also, I have no idea how it's organized, and what would be entailed in organizing their data so I can work with it.

Thing's I'd need to learn:

• What's the rate of ACL injury?
• What's the relationship between injuries and gear or other factors?

Snowfall

Currently NOAA is down, but I am curious to see if there's a way to pull snowfall amounts from different places, map them, and build it on D3 so it's automatically updating. Skiers are huge weather geeks and it'd be cool to have a live map of snowfall totals, to see which place is getting hit the most and why. Also, it could be an interesting long term project to look into climate change predicitions, which in the Sierras, they say is manifested in winter arriving two weeks later and ending two weeks earlier. There's the same amount of precipitation, but more is coming in the form of rain. Again, this is something I'd do for Powder.

I'd need to get data from NOAA. There's also data from observatories, like the Central Sierra Snowlab on Donner Summit, which has been collecting snow and weather data consistently since 1957.

I could talk to Randall Osterhuber who is the director of the Central Sierra Snowlab.