Snow-Creep Pressure on Masts

Larsen, Jan Otto; Laugesen, Jens; Kristensen, Krister

doi:10.1017/s0260305500007801

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 3 publications

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“…They have slowly evolved in parallel with new findings and the experience gained from building kilometers of protection barriers. They have been criticized on several occasions because they are based on oversimplified assumptions of the actual rheological behavior of snow [ McClung , ] and because, in some regions, they fail to provide correct approximations of snow forces [ Larsen et al , ; Katakawa et al , ; Shapiro et al , ; Rudolf‐Miklau and Sauermoser , ; Harada et al , ].…”

Section: Force Due To Gliding Snowmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dynamics of glide avalanches and snow gliding

Ancey

Bain²

2015

Reviews of Geophysics

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In recent years, due to warmer snow cover, there has been a significant increase in the number of cases of damage caused by gliding snowpacks and glide avalanches. On most occasions, these have been full-depth, wet-snow avalanches, and this led some people to express their surprise: how could low-speed masses of wet snow exert sufficiently high levels of pressure to severely damage engineered structures designed to carry heavy loads? This paper reviews the current state of knowledge about the formation of glide avalanches and the forces exerted on simple structures by a gliding mass of snow. One particular difficulty in reviewing the existing literature on gliding snow and on force calculations is that much of the theoretical and phenomenological analyses were presented in technical reports that date back to the earliest developments of avalanche science in the 1930s. Returning to these primary sources and attempting to put them into a contemporary perspective are vital. A detailed, modern analysis of them shows that the order of magnitude of the forces exerted by gliding snow can indeed be estimated correctly. The precise physical mechanisms remain elusive, however. We comment on the existing approaches in light of the most recent findings about related topics, including the physics of granular and plastic flows, and from field surveys of snow and avalanches (as well as glaciers and debris flows). Methods of calculating the forces exerted by glide avalanches are compared quantitatively on the basis of two case studies. This paper shows that if snow depth and density are known, then certain approaches can indeed predict the forces exerted on simple obstacles in the event of glide avalanches or gliding snow cover.

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Section: Force Due To Gliding Snowmentioning

confidence: 99%