Abstract
Abstract
Highlights
The dominant mechanism for growth of snow avalanches is by ploughing into an erodible layer of fresh snow (Sovilla, Sommavilla & Tomaselli 2001; Sovilla & Bartelt 2002; Sovilla, Burlando & Bartelt 2006), with entrainment taking place very close to the flow front
Small-scale experiments are performed to investigate the exchange of particles that occurs between a granular avalanche and the erodible layer on which it propagates
This paper has shown that a finite release of yellow sand on a rough inclined plane covered with an erodible layer of the same material, but coloured red, triggers an avalanche whose behaviour depends on the slope angle and the substrate depth
Summary
The dominant mechanism for growth of snow avalanches is by ploughing into an erodible layer of fresh snow (Sovilla, Sommavilla & Tomaselli 2001; Sovilla & Bartelt 2002; Sovilla, Burlando & Bartelt 2006), with entrainment taking place very close to the flow front. Despite the basal friction rule essentially determining which regions are in motion, Edwards & Gray’s (2015) model was able to accurately predict the amplitude, wavelength and coarsening dynamics of spontaneously formed erosion-deposition waves This is of direct relevance to snow avalanches, which are granular flows, and have been extensively modelled using depth-averaged formulations Erosion-deposition waves with both cross-slope and down-slope variation are modelled using a two-dimensional depth-averaged system that includes granular viscosity (Baker, Barker & Gray 2016) and source terms in the momentum balance equations The latter are momentum conserving because they are comprised of a non-dimensional net acceleration that changes sign depending on the balance between the downslope component of gravity and an effective basal friction rule for angular particles (Edwards et al 2019), which is well characterized for eroding and depositing flows. The equations governing the three-dimensional movement of particles, which are derived from the depth-averaged quantities by assuming a general form of the downslope velocity profile, are numerically integrated at the same time as the depth-averaged mass and momentum equations
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