Benjamin Reuter

CR Cryospheric Sciences

The 2016 Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Award is awarded to Benjamin Reuter for the poster/PICO entitled:

Causes of snow instability variations at the basin scale (Reuter, B.; Richter,B.; Schweizer,J.)

Benjamin Reuter is currently a PostDoc at the WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF, Davos, Switzerland with the research group Avalanche Formation.
His PhD studies focused on avalanche formation processes and the relevant snow cover properties including their spatial variation. His research led to a better understanding of how weather and terrain shape snow instability and aims at enhancing public safety by improving avalanche forecasting. From 2017 on he is pursuing this goal as a research fellow at Montana State University in Bozeman (USA) supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

In this work he developed the first observer independent and process-based metrics for snow instability, applied it to extensive field data collected in an alpine catchment above Davos, Switzerland. This PICO presentation highlights the mapping of snow instability based on external drift kriging with snow and terrain related covariate data. The geostatistical approach allowed identifying the meteorological forcing that had caused the spatial variations featured in the maps. In the future, these data will allow validating spatial snow cover models, which will support future avalanche forecasting.