Avalanche observations at the Ryggfonn test site, Norway, with correlation to snow and weather conditions

Abstract

The Norwegian Geotechnical Institute (NGI) has been running full-scale avalanche experiments at the Ryggfonn test-site in western Norway for close to 40 years. Data from this period involve observations from about 32 artificial avalanche releases and 158 natural ones. In this paper, we do an attempt to correlate avalanche observations and obtained measurements from the Ryggfonn path with snow and weather conditions at the time. In this way, we hope to obtain an improved data set useful for model calibration and to obtain information on avalanche release probability. The final aim is to contribute to the further improvement of the quality of hazard zoning.