Snow avalanche activity is controlled to a large extent by snow and weather patterns. However, its response to climate fluctuations remains poorly documented. Previous studies have focused on direct extraction of trends in avalanche and winter climate data, and this study employs a time-implicit method to model annual avalanche activity in the French Alps during the 1958–2009 period from its mo...

We report AlxIn1-xAsySb1-y PIN and Separate Absorption, Charge and Multiplication (SACM) avalanche photodiodes (APDs) with high temperature stability. This work is based on measurements of avalanche breakdown voltage of these devices for temperatures between 223 K and 363 K. Breakdown voltage temperature coefficients are shown to be lower than those of APDs fabricated with other materials with ...

Two-beam coupling measurements of an avalanche upconversion transition in concentrated Tm:LiYF (4) confirm that, despite the resonant nature of the excited-state optical interaction, the induced response is strongly dispersive. This surprising characteristic is shown to be a general feature of avalanche polarization, with an off-resonant process dominating the resonant response.

Avalanche injury data has generally been derived from medical evaluation of victims, or in the worst case, by autopsy. These post-event examinations evaluate injuries sustained, but cannot directly determine the forces or impact loads experienced by the victim. If an individual is caught in a slide, what forces and accelerations are experienced, and what injuries might result? The MSU Avalanche...

Snow avalanche danger can vary considerably within the large forecast regions in western Canada. Experienced recreationists routinely use the regional bulletin along with local observations to estimate the local avalanche danger. However, some less experienced recreationists are unsure how to interpret the various field observations. To assess a systematic approach, we conducted a field study d...

A magnitude-frequency analysis of rockslide-debris avalanche deposits was performed. Hummocks are conical mounds formed in debris avalanche deposits from the catastrophic sector collapse of a mountain (often volcanic) that represent relatively cohesive fragments of the mountain edifice. Examination of 17 debris avalanche deposits in Japan and the Philippines showed that, in general, the larger ...

We describe a directed avalanche model; a slowly unloading sandbox driven by lowering a retaining wall. The directness of the dynamics allows us to interpret the stable sand surfaces as world sheets of fluctuating interfaces in one lower dimension. In our specific case, the interface growth dynamics belongs to the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) universality class. We formulate relations between the ...

ASTRACT: Snow avalanches pose serious threat to Indian troops deployed in snow-bound areas of western Himalaya during winter months. The most viable way to mitigate avalanche threat in these areas is to precisely predict the time and place of their occurrences. Since, the factors involved in the formation of an avalanche are too many and underlying physical processes are quite complex, no predi...

Recent efforts have enabled applications to query the entire Semantic Web. Such approaches are either based on a centralised store or link traversal and URI dereferencing as often used in the case of Linked Open Data. These approaches make additional assumptions about the structure and/or location of data on the Web and are likely to limit the diversity of resulting usages. In this article we p...