When Switzerland's athletes compete for medals at the 2014 Olympic Winter Games in Sochi, the SLF will be part of the team as well. Local snow and weather forecasts produced by the SLF will enable the team to prepare their competition skis in the best possible way.

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Snow cornices up to several meters high impressively show how strong the wind influences the snow cover in mountains. SLF investigates where the wind erodes and deposits snow and how the snow changes during transport through experiments in a wind tunnel and at the Weissfluhjoch Versuchsfeld.

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In the SLF boundary-layer wind-tunnel the characteristics of saltation are investigated. In particular, the snow particle size distribution, the snow mass concentration and the intermittency of snow transport are addressed. Additionally, particle trajectories of drifting snow, i.e. their ejection/impact velocities and angles, heights, distances, and curvatures are studied.

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In the mountains, snow is distributed very unevenly; enormous variations frequently occur over a very small area. For the first time, SLF researchers have now succeeded in characterising this variability with the aid of a relatively simple statistical model. The technique has the capacity to improve the forecasting of high and low water levels in future.

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Alpine3D is a spatially distributed (surface), three dimensional (atmospheric) model for analyzing and predicting dynamics of snow-dominated surface processes in mountainous topography. It includes models for snow cover, vegetation and soil, snow transport, radiation transfer and runoff which can be enabled or disabled on demand. The model supports a variety of input options including interpolation of meteorological weather stations, input from a meteorological model or from remote sensing data (MeteoIO) and has been parallelized in order to run on computing grids or clusters.

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Höher, schneller, weiter. Mit diesem Anspruch reisen im Februar Spitzenathleten aus aller Welt zu den Olympischen Winterspielen nach Vancouver. Damit die Schweizer im Ziel die entscheidenden Millimeter vorne liegen, arbeitet das SLF eng mit Sportverbänden und Ausrüstern zusammen.

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The aim of this project is the accurate prediction of the spatial distribution of local surface temperatures in mountainous terrain, what is in particular of interest for a detailed winter surface energy balance for avalanche formation and road surface condition prediction. It is found that a detailed surface radiation balance is essential.

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Investigating the spatial and temporal variability of the alpine snowpace is vital for the assessment of avalanche danger as well as the calculation of hydrological resources in an alpine watershed. This variability of the snowpack is governed by snow drift through wind and by the localised energy balance of the snow surface. SLF use the Wannengrat fieldsite to measure these drift parameters and then use them to develop and verify the numerical drift model in the ALPINE3D surface process model

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Beim Gleiten auf Schnee bildet sich durch die Reibungswärme an den Kontaktpunkten Wasser. Je nach Verhalten dieses Wassers verbessert oder verschlechtert sich die Gleitfähigkeit. Um die Gleiteigenschaften von Wintersportgeräten zu verbessern, ist es notwendig, die Prozesse des Systems Schnee/Belag zu verstehen und zu modellieren.

Available languages: German

Grain boundaries play an essential role in snow mechanics. As the weakest link in the structure they have a huge impact on snow properties. We present a method to identify grain boundaries in three dimensions from volumetric micro-CT images based on their characteristic neck-like shape.

Available languages: English