ARLINGTON, Virginia - The recent deaths of 14 Canadian skiers in two separate snow avalanches in British Columbia have increased attention on safety issues, but some U.S. scientists are turning their focus elsewhere to studying the properties of snow stability that could lead to more accurate means of predicting avalanche events.

Montana State University professor of geography Kathy Hansen has received a $160,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to do a comprehensive study of snow stability over space and time. Revealing some of the true properties and behaviors of snow could lead to better predictions of potential avalanches in the western United States as well as in the alpine regions of the world, she contends.

Karl Birkeland, an adjunct professor at Montana State and an avalanche scientist for the U.S. Forest Service National Avalanche Center, is co-principal investigator for the two-year study. He says that even in the East, where mountains are not as high but where concentration of recreational skiers is greater, the danger of avalanches is significant on all open snow covered slopes of 30 degrees and steeper when multiple layers of snow affect its stability.

That is the case this winter in the East, where many slopes have experienced numerous storms making it heaven for skiers, but more risky on avalanche-susceptible mountainsides. Mt. Washington in New Hampshire, for example, accounted for the first two deaths of the current North American winter season when an avalanche buried two people last November.

"Snow is highly dynamic and we've done years of research on snow stability, but now we feel we have the tools to fill a fundamental gap of knowledge by studying how snow stability changes at various geographic locations over time, rather than just taking a single snapshot of an area and making generalizations," Hansen explains. "Snow changes quickly -- by the minute and we want to understand better how to analyze ch
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Contact: Bill Noxon
wnoxon@aol.com
703-292-8070
National Science Foundation
20-Feb-2003

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