The Avalanche Handbook Third Edition by David McClung & Peter Schaerer

Author:David McClung & Peter Schaerer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780898868098
Publisher: The Mountaineers Books

Helpful Techniques

A few techniques can help remove some of the uncertainty in instability. Their success is limited because, in reality, there are complex interactions among factors. There is always a need to consider a mixture of quantitative and qualitative information in any analysis (see Chapter 6 for more information).

Rules of Thumb

Rules of thumb are sometimes applied with the description of the individual factors on the basis of people’s experience. Rules of thumb should not be used operationally in avalanche work: “The only rule of thumb in avalanche work is that there is no rule of thumb” (Perla’s rule of thumb).

Rules of thumb are useless in a given situation. However, some are given in this book along with descriptions of some of the individual factors for rough guidelines about the numerical values of factors. Some people use the term “heuristics” as equivalent to rules of thumb but such meaningless terminology is best avoided. A rule of thumb is one of many examples of bias sometimes used in avalanche forecasting. See Chapter 6 for a thorough discussion of human biases and their place in avalanche forecasting.

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