Snow avalanche friction relation based on extended kinetic theory
Abstract. Rheological models for granular materials play an important role in the numerical simulation of dry dense snow avalanches. This article describes the application of a physically based model from the field of kinetic theory to snow avalanche simulations. Those are usually based on depth-averaged two-dimensional models. Therefore a method to adapt the three-dimensional rheological model is presented. In a further step simulation results are compared to velocity and runout observations of avalanches, recorded from different field tests. As reference we utilize a classic phenomenological friction model, which is commonly applied for hazard estimation. The quantitative comparison is based on the combination of normalized residuals of different observation variables in order to take into account the quality of the simulations in various regards. It is demonstrated that the kinetic theory provides a physically based explanation for the structure of phenomenological friction relations and contributes improvements, in particular when different events and various observation variables are investigated.