By Julie Brown
Whenever an avalanche accident occurs and people are involved, statistics are recorded. Factors like location, group size, and snowpack are written down. My project will analyze these numbers across North America, looking at how each of those factors impacts a person's risk of getting caught in an avalanche.
Not all snowpacks are created equal. The Temperature and weather in Colorado creates a much more instable snowpack than in the Sierra Nevada, and instability translates to a higher probability that a layer of snow will fracture and slide. But what do the numbers say about different snowpack types? Are there more avalanche accidents in Colorado's continental snowpack than in California or Washington's maritime snowpack? I'd like to create a chloropleth map avalanche accidents across North America to determine whether or not human-triggered avalanches occur more frequently in instable snowpacks. If not, then what other factors are at play?
Another aspect of avalanche safety is called heuristics, or the Human Factor. Things like group size, familiarity with the slope, and avalanche education have a direct impact on a skier's decision making and play a role in human-triggered avalanches. I'd like to build a project that would show this. It would be interactive. The user could choose their group size, the location of their day's trip (close to home or far away), and input their level of avalanche education, and a figure representing their risk would be outputted. Maybe I could use sliders and a needle to illustrate it. (Although this sounds super hard).
Two weeks ago, a co-worker of mine posted an op-ed piece about a video that came out showing a skier deploying his airbag in an avalanche. He survived. But the footage seemed to glorify skiing in avalanche terrain, when actually that skier was acting reckless and made a stupid decision. (There were many Human Factors at play). When the story came out, a huge nerve among the skiing community fired. The story erupted on our website and started a huge dialogue on Facebook.
As covered as avalanches have been in the past couple of years, there is still an underlying sense of unease about avalanches among skiers. With more skiers accessing the backcountry now than ever before, this is a very relevant topic in the skiing community
Data from every single avalanche in the United States since 1998 is recorded on avalanche.org.
I'd like to go through this data and use it to build the map and my projects. I can also talk to some of the leading avalanche forecasters in the country, like Bruce Tremper at the Utah Avalanche Center for perspective.
I gave a little background above in the news angle. But to reiterate, avalanches have been covered time and again. Look at Snowfall. But there has yet to be an interactive project where skiers can compute their risk. And while it's well known that there are different kinds of snowpack, I've never known whether more avalanches actually happen in the more unstable regions.
I work for Powder Magazine right now, managing their website. We have a sub-page that we're trying to build out that is devoted to avalanche education. It's called The Safe Zone. I'd like my project to live here.
Does snowpack type correlate with the avalanche accidents and fatalities?
What's the ideal group size for backcountry skiers?
How remote or popular is the terrain where avalanches frequently happen?