Articles | Volume 15, issue 6
https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-15-1275-2015
https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-15-1275-2015
Research article
 | 
18 Jun 2015
Research article |  | 18 Jun 2015

Forest damage and snow avalanche flow regime

T. Feistl, P. Bebi, M. Christen, S. Margreth, L. Diefenbach, and P. Bartelt

Download

Interactive discussion

Status: closed
Status: closed
AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment
Printer-friendly Version - Printer-friendly version Supplement - Supplement
Download
Short summary
Snow avalanches break, uproot and overturn trees, causing damage to forests. In this paper, we define avalanche loading cases representing four different avalanche flow regimes: powder, intermittent, dry and wet. Using a numerical model that simulates both powder and wet snow avalanches, we study documented events with forest damage. We find that powder clouds with velocities over 20m/s break tree stems and that quasi-static pressures of wet snow avalanches are much higher than dynamic pressure.
Altmetrics
Final-revised paper
Preprint