Linking avalanche danger ratings to the conceptual model of avalanche hazard

Avalanche Canada and Park Canada publish avalanche bulletins daily to provide backcountry users with information on avalanche hazard. Since 2010, Canadian bulletins follow the recently developed conceptual model of avalanche hazard (CMAH), which describes the key components of avalanche hazard and how to combine them into an overall assessment. However, the CMAH does not provide guidance on how hazard assessments relate to danger ratings on the North American Public Avalanche Danger Scale, a crucial tool for avalanche risk communication and a central component of avalanche bulletins. The lack of this link makes danger ratings vulnerable to forecaster error and biases. The aim of this study is to provide an explicit, quantitative link between CMAH assessments and danger ratings. A variety of supervised machine learning techniques are utilized to establish this relationship based on archived avalanche bulletins from 2009/10 to 2017/18. TO BE CONT’D

Faculty Supervisor:

Pascal Haegeli

Student:

Taylor Clark

Partner:

Avalanche Canada

Discipline:

Environmental sciences

Sector:

Sports and recreation

University:

Program: