A multitude of systems ranging from the Barkhausen effect in ferromagnetic materials to plastic deformation and earthquakes respond to slow external driving by exhibiting intermittent, scale-free avalanche dynamics or crackling noise. The avalanches are power-law distributed in size, and have a typical average shape: these are the two most important signatures of avalanching systems. Here we sh...

A fine analysis of the statistics of dry granular avalanches in a rotating drum setup reveals that, beyond the fluctuations, the angle at which an avalanche ends is correlated experimentally to the angle at which the avalanche starts. This correlation resulting from inertia defines an intermediate "neutral" angle that characterizes the corresponding granular pile. In addition, an intensive stud...

Ballast as a part of the railway system plays an important role in the operation of the railways and also has a great impact on repair and maintenance activities. Hence most of the repair and maintenance activities in traditional railway systems are due to the defections in the ballast layer and therefore most of the maintenance budget is spent on repairing these defects. These repair and maint...

Abstract — This paper develops analytical models for the avalanche characteristics of a class of block ciphers usually referred to as substitution-permutation encryption networks or SPNs. An SPN is considered to display good avalanche characteristics if a one bit change in the plaintext input is expected to result in close to half the ciphertext output bits changing. Good avalanche characterist...

A regional study of snow avalanche processes was undertaken in the SE Pyrenees. Dendrogeomorphology was used to date and reconstruct large-scale snow avalanche events that occurred in the last four decades. Dendrochronological analyses yielded the dates of nine winters when avalanches occurred in the recent past in six studied avalanche paths. Some of these avalanches were already known, but ot...

After the avalanche winter of 1999 in Switzerland, which caused 17 deaths and damage of over CHF 600 mill. in buildings and on roads, the project IFKIS, aimed at improving the basics of organizational measures (closure of roads, evacuation etc.) in avalanche risk management, was initiated. The three main parts of the project were the development of a compulsory checklist for avalanche safety se...

This paper presents two avalanche forecasting applications NXD2000 and NXD-REG which were developed at the Swiss Federal Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research (SLF). Even both are based on the nearest neighbour method they are targeted to different scales. NXD2000 is used to forecast avalanches on a local scale. It is operated by avalanche forecasters responsible for snow safety at snow spo...

this research that was made on 66 cyclones in wet periods of midwest of iran in a given period (1973-2003) shows that in intense wet periods, cyclogensis centers of mediterranean sea, sudan, red sea and mesopotamia were severely active and have been very effective in rainfall of study area. such systems in general, with respect to dominant synoptic patterns, enters into study area from three ma...