Information Transfer and Cartographic Design Issues for Avalanche Risk Mapping

BACKGROUND The joint project “LWD Online Maps” between the Avalanche Warning Center Tyrol (Innsbruck, Austria) and the University of Vienna, Department of Geography and Regional Research is now ongoing for several years. Its goal has been and still is to develop and maintain a complex and very powerful database driven online decision support system for cartographic visualization and analysis of current avalanche relevant factors in the Tyrolean Alps. In order to understand the avalanche situation, it is important to have realtime spatial coverage of meteorological and snow pack factors as well as information covering the avalanche danger scale. Nowadays, all information can be interactively made accessible to the user. This data can include information on current snow depth, amount of snow accumulation within the last 24 hours, temperature, wind speed and direction in addition to the regional distribution of the avalanche danger scale, including height and temporal dependencies. The crucial factor is, however, how to administrate and communicate this vital information in a sound cartographic fashion to accommodate the user’s needs.