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Abstract

Alpine ski-touring and off-piste freeriding enjoy great popularity in recent years. Countless friends of winter sport activities enter uncontrolled terrain and relish moments in remote high-alpine landscapes. In addition to the requisite attentiveness for the surrounding flora and fauna, an awareness of the current snow and avalanche conditions is of great importance for safety reasons, prior to the engagement in winter sports activities. To improve the quality and availability of information on avalanche problems and danger levels, the European national avalanche warning services increasingly coordinate and pool information enabling the provision of systematic, transnational and multi-lingual reports and visualizations (e.g. www.avalanche.report). Out of this transnational effort, a database with detailed avalanche forecast information covering large parts of the European Alps comes into being. The standardized structure and descriptions of the reports enable a systematic analysis. First objective of this study is the development of an open-source software to download and extract avalanche forecast information for selected locations and time frames. The provision of the software in the form of a R package ensures easy access, re-usability and modifiability. In a second step, we assess the potential of meteorological and snow-hydrological observations including measurements of wind-driven snow-redistribution as well as dynamically downscaled ERA5 reanalysis data to detect critical avalanche conditions.