Item: LINKING SNOWPITS TO SNOW MECHANICS WITH AN EXTENSIBLE ALGORITHMIC FRAMEWORK
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Title: LINKING SNOWPITS TO SNOW MECHANICS WITH AN EXTENSIBLE ALGORITHMIC FRAMEWORK
Proceedings: Proceedings, International Snow Science Workshop, Whistler, BC, Canada, 2026
Authors:
- Mary Kate Connelly [ Montana State University, College of Letters and Science, Department of Mathematical Sciences, Bozeman, MT, USA ]
- Philipp L. Rosendahl [ Technical University of Darmstadt, Institute of Structural Mechanics and Design, Darmstadt, Germany ]
- Valentin Adam [ Technical University of Darmstadt, Institute of Structural Mechanics and Design, Darmstadt, Germany ] [ WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF, Davos Dorf, Switzerland ]
- Samuel V. Verplanck [ Montana State University, Norm Asbjornson College of Engineering, Department of Civil Engineering, Bozeman, MT, USA ]
Date: 2026-09-28
Abstract: Mechanical models of avalanche release require mechanical properties of snow, such as Young's modulus, E, and Poisson's ratio, ν, that are seldom measured directly in snowpits. Snowpit observations are widely collected, standardized, and central to avalanche practice, but the methods available to translate them into mechanical parameters remain limited. Multiple published parameterizations can estimate mechanical properties from common field observations, but they differ in input requirements, validity domains, and resulting uncertainty, and their chained combinations have not been systematically enumerated or compared. We present SnowPyt-MechParams, an extensible graph-based framework that encodes a selection of parameterizations and their dependencies as a directed acyclic graph, enumerates unique calculation pathways, executes those pathways on slab objects derived from snowpit observations, and propagates input measurement uncertainty through chained calculations. As an example implementation, we use SnowPylot to parse SnowPilot CAAMML files from the 2015–2025 water years, yielding 50,278 snowpits, 371,429 layers, and 14,776 slabs constructed from propagating Extended Column Test results. We compare the number of valid pathways and the coverage across those pathways to ascertain the slope-parallel component of slab weight per unit area, W_shear, with and without elasticity parameters E and ν for each layer in the slab. Within the implemented framework, there are four valid pathways for W_shear, and the highest coverage pathway succeeds for 5,470 slabs (37.0 %). The mechanically richer target with elasticity yields 32 valid pathways, of which the highest coverage pathways succeed for only 687 slabs (4.6 %). These results surface a gap between modern mechanical model requirements and currently available methods for estimating mechanical parameters from snowpit observations.
Object ID: ISSW2026_P4.34.pdf
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15788/1790099334
Language of Article: English
Presenter(s): Mary Connelly
Keywords: snow mechanics; snowpits; avalanche release; SnowPilot; parameterization; uncertainty
Page Number(s): 1603 - 1610
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