21st century projections of dry- and wet-snow avalanche activity

This data set includes 21st century projections of dry- and wet-snow avalanche activity for seven sites in the Swiss Alps as well as the downscaled climate scenarios and SNOWPACK configuration files used to produce these projections. The methods used to produce these data are described in the research article:

Mayer, S., Hendrick, M., Michel, A., Richter, B., Schweizer, J., Wernli, H., and van Herwijnen, A.: Changes in snow avalanche activity in response to climate warming in the Swiss Alps, EGUsphere, 2024, 1-32, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-1026, 2024.

We used downscaled climate projections to drive the snow cover model SNOWPACK and evaluated future dry- and wet-snow avalanche occurrences in the vicinity of seven automatic weather stations from the IMIS network using machine learning models trained with observed records of avalanche activity. Projections are available for three different emission scenarios (Representative Concentration Pathways, RCP2.6, RCP4.5 and RCP8.5) and eight climate model chains from the CH2018 ensemble. The output of the model chain is given by a daily probability for dry- or wet-snow avalanche occurrences. These probabilities can then be used to classify a day as a dry- and wet-snow avalanche day (AvD) or non-avalanche day.

• WSL research program CCAMM (Climate Change Impacts on Alpine Mass Movements).