Skredpodden

9 out of 10 fatal avalanche accidents are triggered by the victim or someone in their party. This means, like Roger Atkins pointed out more than 20 years ago, that avalanche is a human problem, not a snow problem. 
One of the ways to remedy this is by education. But does it work?

Kelly McNeal is a professor in community health and also an avalanche instructor. 
She presents insights from a survey study on avalnche education and an trend study of avalanche accidents.

www.issw2024.com/registration

Our climate is changing, that we know. What we do not fully know is how that will impact avalanche hazards around the world - and how the hazard may increase the avalanche risk. 

Guest: Nicolas Eckert
Host: Audun Hetland

www.issw2024.com/registration

We are delighted to welcome everyone to Tromsø.
In this podcast we go through the program of the conference, what you can expect and what we recommend while you are here. 

You find weather forecast at 
www.yr.no 

Guest: Chair of the conference Rune Engeset
Host: Audun Hetland

www.issw2024.com/registration

How has technology changed the way we mitigate avalanche risk? A talk with Wyssen avalanche control and Cautus geo, the two main sponsors for the ISSW2024.

27% of Norwegian roads go through avalanche terrain. Previously the norwegian solution was to build tunnels. But you can only build so many. The past decade a leap in technology and also prevention systems often used in other contries has become popular in Norway. 

In this podcast we talk with Wyssen avalanche control and cautusgeo, the two main sponsors for the ISSW. We ask them what the future looks like in avalanche prevention terms.  

www.issw2024.com/registration

Our climate is changing and this means that the avalanches will change. Many of our models are built around cold snow avalanches, but in a warming climate we need to update our understanding of how warmer and wetter avalanches will change the avalanche risk.

Michael Kohler is a PhD Student at SLF Davos/EPFL studying avalanche-obstacle interaction. While others rely on explosives, he trigger avalanches with just a few lines of code using a numerical simulations  But he is not always just behind the screen. Sometimes you can also find him at the full-scale avalanche test site at Vallée de la Sionne.
 

www.issw2024.com/registration

Being able to detect if an avalanche has released and its path is obviously important for avalanche warning and mitigation efforts. But how do you detect an avalanche? They often happen at night, in poor visibility hopefully far enough away from people.
One way to do that is by using infrasound, the low frequency sound that our human ear can not hear.
In this podcast we talk with Jeffrey B. Johnsen, a professor and infra sound specialist from Boise state university (USA).

If you would like to hear what the avalanches sound like you find the link to the sound from an intense avalanche cycle in Little Cottonwood Canyon (LCC) in Utah, U.S. here 
(website credit: Skyler Chase, student, Boise State University)

Guest: Jeffrey B. Johnson
Host: Audun Hetland

www.issw2024.com/registration

Avalanches is a danger to people and infrastructure. But unlike people, houses can't move when the avalanche danger is high. So how to you protect a settlement against avalanches? 
In this podcast we talk with Priska Hiller and the case Mosjøen - a small town in Nortern-Norway.

Guest: Priska Hiller (NVE)
Host: Audun Hetland

www.issw2024.com/registration

Creating an accurate avalanche forecast is by no means an easy task. Snow conditions change from hour to hour and meter to meter. Forecasters often har few observations and weather stations, and large regions to forecast.
One approach to improve to help the forecasters is to create a weather and snow pack models - and not only one, but a chain of models.

In this podcast we talk wit Florian Herla which has been working on such model chains together with the Norwegian Avalanche Warning Service and Simon Fraser University.

In the podcast we discuss the open source models AWSOME, which can be found at: https://gitlab.com/avalanche-warning

And the international working group AvaCollabra focusing on snow cover modeling in support of avalanche forecasting: https://gitlab.com/avacollabra 

Florian Herlas contact information https://avalancheresearch.ca/team/herla/

And a link to a paper that validates the snowpack simulations in Canada, where many concepts from this podcast conversation can be found.

https://nhess.copernicus.org/articles/24/2727/2024/nhess-24-2727-2024.html

www.issw2024.com/registration

Stability tests are widely used and an important source of information when trying to evaluate snow stability. In this podcast we take a deep dive into the snow mechanics within the compression tests to understand what happens in an compression test and an extended column test.

You can find the scientific paper here. 

Guest: Samuel Verplanck
Host: Audun Hetland 

www.issw2024.com/registration

In this podcast serie we will talk with contributers to the ISSW conference. There are still conference passes available: www.issw2024.com/registration. We have a very nice online service where you can interactively follow the conference online.

In this episode we talk about how guides make their decisions. Most of us can choose the day and the people we like to go skiing with. Guides often can not. How do guides manage their group, choose where to ski and manage the balansing act between keeping their clients relatively safe while still providing them with exciting skiing. 

Stig Løland has been a IFMGA guide for 20 years. He has been teaching students decision making in avalanche terrain and the past four years he has been working with his PhD on decision making in avalanche terrain focusing on guides. 

Host: Audun Hetland, www.uit.no/research/care

www.issw2024.com/registration