We did the rounds of the Juneau area urban avalanche paths today, and found none of the slides we had expected to be triggered by heavy rains. The reason is a very good example of the dynamics of high latitude maritime snowpacks, and also illustrates well why fulltime daily staffing is a prerequisite for an avalanche forecasting program.

There was a light fall of slushy snow at sea level yesterday morning, and it was slushy up high too. Though temperatures normally decrease and the snow gets drier with altitude, it is quite common for storms here to either mix warm air in at all elevations relevant to us, or to have warm air overriding cooler air.

Either way, these storms drop moist to wet snow at starting zone elevations. The gentle fall of slushy snow yesterday allowed the surface layers to wet out slowly, keeping them below the critical stress level, and rendering them moist enough by day's end to be insensitive to last night and today's heavy rain.

One of our research projects is aimed at better understanding of this phenomenon. Dry snow is well known to release rapidly when triggered by rain, while we have recorded that moist "peanut butter powder" snow often shows an ability to deform tremendously when rained on, without going into brittle fracture mode. We are attempting to better define the boundaries of the two different responses.

We suspected that this slow wetting process was occurring yesterday, but without staff to get out and check it in the field, then put together a report, we could do nothing. Our one volunteer staffer was dealing with a huge backlog of administrative chores all day.

We can easily do the avalanche forecasts our community needs, but we cannot do it without funding. If you want them, you must demand that your representatives at all levels of government get us the funding we need to do our job!