SFU Avalanche Research Program

With a week since our return from Bend, Oregon, we’re reflecting on the incredible week at the ISSW. With so many great moments, it's hard to sum up the whole experience, but we'd like to share a few of our highlights! ✨

We are so grateful for the monumental effort of the ISSW organizers in bringing together such an engaged, passionate, motivated, and supportive group of people from all around the world 🌍🏔️Thank you also to all those who attended our presentations, struck up conversations, and stoked our research fire!🔥We are excited to connecting again and to keep contributing to the important work being done in the snow and avalanche industry 🤝

A busy and successful first day at the ISSW is complete! ✅ The fun continues with presentations tomorrow from Florian, Eeva, Anneliese, Pascal, and Anne! Scroll through to see the “when, who, and what” of our day tomorrow.

Thanks to for the 📸

The SARP team has arrived in Bend, Oregon for the 2023 International Snow Science Workshop! While there is no shortage of amazing people to hear from throughout the week, we’ll be highlighting the SARP presentation schedule for each day. Presentations kickoff tomorrow and it’s going to be a busy one for the SARP team! Scroll through to see 😊

You can find a the complete conference schedule here: https://www.issw2023.com/program-schedule

It is with great excitement and honour that we introduce you to Dr. Florian Herla who successfully defended (i.e., totally rocked!) his PhD dissertation today. 🎉💫👏

On behalf of the entire SARP team - it has been a pleasure and honour to be part of your journey. We are immensely proud of you and are looking forward to your next steps in the avalanche safety community and beyond!

You can find Florian’s research here: https://avalancheresearch.ca/team/herla/

In her master’s research, Anneliese introduced audience segmentation to avalanche research, an approach that seeks to understand target audiences. Anneliese’s thesis is composed of two papers which, together, offer a richer and more holistic picture of the winter backcountry community for the improvement, design, and evaluation of avalanche safety initiatives. You can find these papers here: https://avalancheresearch.ca/pubs/2023_neweduk_thesis/.

More SARP research is now available on our website!

Gaining a comprehensive understanding of recreationists’ risk management practices is crucial to tailoring risk management supports to the needs of the diverse and expanding winter backcountry community. Rosie's research contributes to this effort by using qualitative social science methods that centered the stories of recreationists to identify, characterize, and contextualize their avalanche risk management decision-making.

You can find Rosie's thesis published here:

We are excited to share Stan's dissertation, which investigates how visual analytics tools and techniques can address ambiguity in avalanche forecasting. We'll be sharing more detailed insights into Stan's research soon... in the meantime, you can find his thesis publication here: https://avalancheresearch.ca/pubs/2023_nowak_thesis/

Congratulations to Anneliese Neweduk on the successful completion of her master's defense this morning! 🎉🥳 Her committee and all audience members were very impressed with her research, “Characterizing an Increasingly Diverse and Growing Backcountry Community. A holistic and informative approach using audience segmentation.”

You'll be able to catch Annelise presenting her research at the upcoming and access her thesis on our website soon.

Our team is so excited to have the opportunity to contribute to the 2023 International Snow Science Workshop (ISSW) in Bend, Oregon! Our schedules will be full with a total of 13 presentations (oral and poster) coming from the SARP team, covering both the social science and natural science focuses of our research. Scroll through to see the titles and authors of those presentations.

You can read the abstracts for all SARP presentations here: www.avalancheresearch.ca/issw2023/

Recordings of our presentations at this year’s CAA Spring Conference are now available online! You can find them all linked here: http://www.avalancheresearch.ca/presentation-videos/
1. Pascal Haegeli - Facilitating a More User-centered Design of Avalanche Safety Products and Services

2. Simon Horton & Pascal Haegeli - Research on Avalanche Problems: Where do We Go Next to Improve Hazard Assessments?

3. Rosie Langford & Pascal Haegeli - How do Winter Backcountry Recreationists Make Avalanche Risk Management Decisions?

4. Anneliese Neweduk & Pascal Haegeli - More Holistic and Informative Approach for Characterizing Backcountry Community

5. Florian Herla, Pascal Haegeli, Simon Horton & Patrick Mair- Validating Snowpack Simulations for Critical Layers

6. John Sykes, Pascal Haegeli, Roger Atkins, & Mike Welch - Characterizing the 2023 Guiding Season – from the guide on the ground and from GPS and avalanche terrain data

ay back in January 2022, we shared some insights about how bulletin users interpret the danger scale from research completed by master’s student, Abby Morgan. Today we have some exciting news about that research… It has been published in the Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences Journal!

🟢🟡🟠🔴⚫️

Titled "A user perspective on the avalanche danger scale – insights from North America", the study used 3195 online survey responses to explore how backcountry recreationists interpret and use avalanche danger ratings. The findings of this study are important for avalanche warning services since the danger rating scale is a key tool for communicating avalanche hazard to the public. In the discussion section of this paper, the authors, Abby Morgan, Pascal Haegeli, Henry Finn, and Patrick Mair, elaborate on opportunities for optimizing the danger scale to better meet the needs of users who depend on the ratings the most.

You can find the paper here: http://www.avalancheresearch.ca/pubs/2023_morgan_dangerscale/