Power‐laws and snow avalanches
- 15 June 2002
- journal article
- Published by American Geophysical Union (AGU) in Geophysical Research Letters
- Vol. 29 (11)
- https://doi.org/10.1029/2001gl014623
Abstract
This paper presents evidence of frequency‐size power‐laws in several groups of snow avalanche paths. Other natural hazards, such as earthquakes and forest fires, exhibit similar power‐law relationships. In addition, an analysis of the response of one group of snow avalanche paths to storms through time demonstrates a power‐law between the response of the system and the binned frequency of those responses. Our results, as well as our experience with these complex, non‐linear systems, are consistent with self‐organized criticality. The practical implication of this work is that the frequency‐size relationship for small and medium sized avalanches may be useful for quantifying the risk of large snow avalanches within a group of avalanche paths.Keywords
This publication has 12 references indexed in Scilit:
- Measurements of mass balance in dense snow avalanche eventsAnnals of Glaciology, 2001
- Critical Phenomena in Natural SciencesPublished by Springer Nature ,2000
- Review of dry snow slab avalanche releaseCold Regions Science and Technology, 1999
- Forest Fires: An Example of Self-Organized Critical BehaviorScience, 1998
- Self‐organized criticality in a landslide modelGeophysical Research Letters, 1998
- Self-organized critical forest-fire modelPhysical Review Letters, 1992
- Self-organized criticality in a continuous, nonconservative cellular automaton modeling earthquakesPhysical Review Letters, 1992
- Self-Organized CriticalityScientific American, 1991
- Self-organized criticalityPhysical Review A, 1988
- Self-organized criticality: An explanation of the 1/fnoisePhysical Review Letters, 1987