Abstract
Each year in the Carpathian Mountains and the Sudety Mountains snow avalanches cause a great number of accidents. Avalanches also threaten buildings and affect the environment.
The latest studies in Poland aim to implement advanced snow avalanche hazard mapping procedures, which would allow the creation of complex cartographic products for the location of avalanche hazard areas. These preliminary studies showed that results of these procedures strongly depend on the quality of the input digital surface data.
The main goal of this study is to investigate this problem in detail through comparison of different types of Digital Elevation Models (DEMs), putting stress on high resolution DEMs generated from airborne and terrestrial laser scanning, in the context of estimating potential avalanche release areas and making run-out calculations. Test sites in the Tatra Mountains in the Carpathians and in the Karkonosze Mountains in the Sudety Mountains were selected for this study.
The analysis was performed using Swiss Rapid Mass Movements (RAMMS) model and modified script on delineation automated release area. The study recognized that not only quality but also resolution of a digital surface models influence the accuracy of release area and volume estimation, calculated topography parameters, location of avalanche track and other parameters calculated by dynamic models.