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Avalanche crown-depth distributions
Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara, California, USA
Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara, California, USA
Forest Service National Avalanche Center, USDA, Bozeman, Montana, USA
The literature disagrees about the statistical distribution of snow avalanche crown depths. Large datasets from Mammoth Mountain, California and the Westwide Avalanche Network show that the three-parameter generalized extreme value distribution provides the most robust fit, followed by a two-parameter variation, the Fréchet distribution. The most parsimonious explanation is neither self-organized criticality nor other complex cascades, but the maximum domain of attraction, implying that distributions of individual avalanche crown depths are scaling. We also show that crown depths do not have a universal tail index. Rather, they range from 2.8 to 4.6 over different avalanche paths, consistent with other geophysical phenomena such as wildfires, which show similar variability.
Received 23 August 2008; accepted 3 November 2008; published 10 December 2008.
Citation: (2008), Avalanche crown-depth distributions, Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L23502, doi:10.1029/2008GL035788.
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