Detrainment and braking of snow avalanches interacting with forests

Abstract

Mountain forests provide natural protection against avalanches. They can both prevent avalanche formation in release zones and reduce avalanche mobility in runout areas. Although the braking effect of forests has been previously explored through global statistical analyses on documented avalanches, little is known about the mechanism of snow detrainment in forests for small and medium avalanches. In this study, we investigate the detrainment and braking of snow avalanches in forested terrain, by performing three-dimensional simulations using the material point method (MPM) and a large-strain elastoplastic snow constitutive model based on critical state soil mechanics. First, the snow internal friction is evaluated using existing field measurements based on the detrainment mass, showing the feasibility of the numerical framework and offering a reference case for further exploration of different snow types. Then, we systematically investigate the influence of snow properties and forest parameters on avalanche characteristics. Our results suggest that for both the cold and warm snow parameterized in our simulations, the detrainment mass decreases with the square of the avalanche front velocity before it reaches a plateau value. Furthermore, the detrainment mass significantly depends on snow properties. It can be as much as 10 times larger for warm snow compared to cold snow. By examining the effect of forest configurations, it is found that forest density and tree diameter have cubic and square relations with the detrainment mass, respectively. The outcomes of this study may contribute to the development of improved formulations of avalanche-forest interaction models in popular operational simulation tools and thus improve hazard assessment for alpine geophysical mass flows in forested terrain.