Power-laws and snow avalanches

This paper presents evidence of frequency‐size power‐laws in several groups of snow avalanche paths. Other natural hazards, such as earthquakes and forest fires, exhibit similar power‐law relationships. In addition, an analysis of the response of one group of snow avalanche paths to storms through time demonstrates a power‐law between the response of the system and the binned frequency of those responses. Our results, as well as our experience with these complex, non‐linear systems, are consistent with self‐organized criticality. The practical implication of this work is that the frequency‐size relationship for small and medium sized avalanches may be useful for quantifying the risk of large snow avalanches within a group of avalanche paths.