International Snow Science Workshop Grenoble – Chamonix Mont-Blanc - 2013 NIVEXC: an electronic snow-pole for real-time monitoring of avalanche starting zones Massimiliano Barbolini 1, *,Matteo Baudone 2 , Francesco Ferro 1 , Laura Ricchetti 2 , Francesco Stefanini 1 1 FLOW-ING s.r.l., La Spezia, Italy 2 INSIS s.p.a., La Spezia, Italy ABSTRACT: Knowledge of amount of new snow, total snow depth and internal property of snow- cover in avalanche release zones are well known to be key factors for effective avalanche prediction. However, in case of snow storms and dangerous conditions, manual snow-cover investigations in the upper part of avalanche paths are unfeasible for safety reasons. Nevertheless, monitoring from valley bottom or helicopter by means of traditional snow-poles is often not possible because of bad weather conditions. NIVEXC allows to overcome the mentioned problems, as it is an autonomous electronic snow-pole provided with a vertical array of sensor and suitable for installation in avalanche starting zones. NIVEXC is able to record and real-time transmit to a remote server important snow cover prop- erties, such as total snow height, snow precipitation amounts and rates, temperature profiles. This in- novative device will be described and first results from a full-scale installation during winter season 2012-13 will be presented. KEYWORDS: avalanche forecasting, starting zone monitoring, snow depth measurement, tempera- ture profile. 1 INTRODUCTION Knowledge of snow-cover properties in ava- lanche release areas is of great help for ava- lanche forecasting. However, due to severe conditions typical of starting zones, the devel- opment of instruments for automatic monitoring of snow cover in these zones is a difficult task and only few experiences do exist nowadays. NIVEXC is an electronic snow-pole, for measuring total snow depth, snow precipitation rates and temperature profile in avalanche start- ing zones which has been recently developed with a joint effort of two Italian companies, FLOW-ING & INSIS. Main features of NIVEXC are robustness, reliability, low operating cost, ease of installation and maintenance. NIVEXC technical details are briefly de- scribed at § 2. First full-scale installation and preliminary results are presented at § 3. 2 THE INSTRUMENT NIVEXC pole is made by a cold shaped alu- minium box frame, 3.00 m long and 8 cm wide. The box tube frame has been designed accord- ing to Eurocode#9. Snow cover loads have been estimated on the base of Swiss Guidelines (Margreth, 2007). In order to optimise structural design and to reduce lateral displacements and vibrations, NIVEXC pole has been designed with a full joint at the bottom and provided with a double bracing system placed at 2/5 and 4/5 of its height. Figure 1. A picture of an operational NIVEXC pole; the pole is coloured in black with 10 cm thick yellow stripes applied at 40 cm step in or- der to allow also visual monitoring of snow depth from the valley bottom (see Figure 5). The pole is provided with 14 windows along its length, with a 20 cm gap from one another. Each window is suited to hold a “sensor box” ______________________ * Corresponding author address: Massimiliano Barbolini, FLOW-ING s.r.l. La Spezia, ITALY tel: +39 (0)187 500158; fax: +39 (0)187 529777; email: m.barbolini@flow-ing.com 945