Avalanche studies at Alpental

Glide avalanches and equipment installation

Installing the equipment (looking east)

During the winter of 2003-2004, we installed a variety of instrumentation above Rock Face. Instrumentation includes air temperature, snow temperature, solar intensity, a cable-extension transducer, and a three-component geophone.


Installing the geophone - bolted to the rock on
stainless steel platform

The a cable-extension transducer will measure line-length extension/time and geophone will record the precise time of failure.

Design drawings I

Experiment design and components of snowpack
deformation (after McClung and Schaerer, 1993).

Cable transducer records line length changes of the cable within the snowpack, where line length change/unit time yields glide rate. The geophone records the precise time of failure.

The temperature sensor at the snow-rock interface will allow us to determine if there is sepaartion between the snowpack and rock surface. We might install an addition cable transducer to the top of the snowpack; this will help us to further differentiate between glide and creep mechanisms.

In addition, we might conduct dye experiments on Rock Face in order to determine if water is retained under the snowpack, maintaining excess water pressure and initiating high glide velocities after a rain-on-snow event.