Avalanche Risks in the Swiss Mountains

We developed a data analytics tool in which snow and weather data as well as historical avalanche accidents are analyzed to compute avalanche risks. The focus of the tool is the monitoring of the current situation in the Swiss Alps to provide an overview and to warn people before starting their walking, hiking, or skiing activities in the mountains. To reach this goal we applied dimensionality reduction and clustering techniques to project the data to lower dimensions and to structure it. The avalanche accident data is additionally included to allow the judgment of the current and past snow weather situations in terms of how risky it is for people when doing their daily mountain activities. We illustrate the usefulness of the data analytics tool by applying it to data measured at several hundred measurement stations at different locations and elevations in the Swiss Alps. Finally, we discuss scalability issues and limitations before we conclude with future work.