Colorado Avalanche Information Center wants your opinion on forecast communications
The Colorado Avalanche Information Center is looking for your help to create a better-understood risk forecast for avalanches in mountainous areas of the state. In a post on social media, the state-run organization addressed its community:
"How do you understand the North American Avalanche Danger Scale? We're running a survey to learn how people use and interpret the Danger Scale—and we want to hear from YOU! You don't need to be an expert. Your feedback helps make avalanche safety info clearer and more effective for everyone."
"Communicating the forecast that we produce is really the hardest part," Ethan Greene, CAIC Director, said. "We've been doing this a long time where we're pretty good at forecasting avalanche hazard, although the scale of that and how precise that can be is certainly limited by a lot of different factors. But communicating that to people and really getting it to them at a time and a place and in a way where it can impact their decisions and help them stay safe...that's really what we're trying to do."
The current danger scale has been in place for years and runs from 1 to 5; the smaller the number, the lower the chance for an avalanche to trigger. A lot of things go into that formula to achieve the "danger scale" number, Greene explained, so making sure the variables are obvious is helpful to the people checking for better information.
"Changing the scale itself is certainly not off the table," Greene said. "We did change it about 20 years ago, and the Europeans are in the middle of looking at making some changes to their scale. But making really big changes to it is a tough and laborious and time-consuming process. So it's certainly not off the table."
