Predicting avalanches with car technology
It’s a bountiful winter in the snowy Sierra Nevada, with the biggest snowpack in 22 years. That’s great news for skiers and snowboarders, but all that snow can transform in an instant from a beautiful blanket to a deadly shroud when an avalanche hits.
In December, doctor Tom Barker, 64, was swept more than 200 yards in an avalanche that left him buried under 9 feet of snow, after he and a friend skied into a closed area at the Mt. Rose ski resort near Lake Tahoe without their avalanche-safety gear. Barker did not survive.
Slides kill one or two winter-wilderness travelers every couple of years in the Sierras around Lake Tahoe. For every death, avalanche experts say, about 10 people are caught in a cascade of snow and ice and barely escape with their lives.
As the backcountry becomes an increasingly popular winter destination — activities outside the bounds of ski resorts rose 21 percent in the U.S. last winter, according to Snowsports Industries America — the likelihood of tragedy has grown.
That popularity, and the risk, are driving companies to develop new avalanche-safety products based on bleeding-edge technology better known in the fastevolving realms of self-driving cars, the internet of things, and big-data computing. The technology holds promise for preventing fatalities, according to experts, but it’s in its infancy.
“Everyone wants the avalanche goggles that you can just look everywhere and see whether it’s safe or not — I don’t think we’re ever going to get there,” said Jeffrey Deems, a research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado. “But we can start to create new observations that help us get a better view of how the snowpack varies across the terrain.”
One method for making those observations uses Lidar, the laser-based system used by some self-driving cars to gauge distance. With this equipment, avalanche forecasters can measure the snow depth at a known avalanche starting point — one of the best but most dangerous spots for assessing slide risk — from more than 1,000 yards away, Deems said.
Without Lidar, judging the snowpack in an avalanche zone involves measuring it elsewhere and estimating depth at the starting point, he said.
"There’s quite a lot of uncertainty associated with that,” Deems said. “This new technology allows us to really see the pattern of snow accumulation.”
Another relatively new high-tech tool for predicting avalanches is a “smart” probe by Mountain Hub that’s inserted into the snowpack and uses built-in pressure and depth sensors to identify problematic layers, such as ice from which the snow on top could slide, or large crystals that could crumble under pressure, leading to the same result.
Information on snow layers can be uploaded to a database to help avalanche forecasters track the presence of weak or slippery sheets buried across a landscape.
However, while new developments in avalanche-safety tech such as the smart probe and Lidar may pay off in saved lives in the future, they’re not all that useful yet, argued Brandon Schwartz, lead avalanche forecaster for the Sierra Avalanche Center, a nonprofit partner of the U.S. Forest Service, which puts out daily slide-hazard bulletins.
The Lidar system, at about $200,000, is prohibitively expensive for many forecasters whose agencies rely on government funding and donations as well as for many safety teams that use explosives to blast potential avalanche areas near highways, railroads and in ski resorts to create controlled slides, Schwartz said. And that system can’t reveal the level of detail in the snowpack’s layering that Schwartz and his colleagues need, he said.
Mountain Hub’s probe, the $1,500 Avatech SP2, has accuracy issues and “is not that great, unfortunately,” Schwartz said. “It’s not really there yet as a tool that has enough worth to be in widespread use.”
Both systems have potential to evolve and prove useful for analyzing the snowpack and producing large data sets that could add detail and scale to the forecasting process, Schwartz added.
Mountain Hub marketing director TJ Kolanko acknowledged the SP2’s deficiencies, but said the company was working to improve its technology. This fall, it plans to launch the consumer-oriented Avatech Scope, a “smart” ski pole that has a pressure sensor in the tip and a depth sensor on the shaft. The gadget will cost $499 and will come with a second, standard ski pole.