PROPOSAL FOR AN AUTO-UPDATING SNOWFALL MAP OF THE TRENTINE TERRITORY (EASTERN ALPS OF ITALY)

From the early 80s, the “Snow, Avalanches and Meteorology Office of Trento (Italy) Autonomous Province” (“Ufficio Neve,Valanghe e Meteorologia della Provincia Autonoma di Trento”), actually “Ufficio Previsione e Prevenzione” monitors the snowfall conditions and studies avalanches in the same territory; in particular, it manages a network of over 30 manual snow fields, plus about ten automatic measurement stations, added during the last 10 years, between 800 and 2750 meters (Fig. 1). Complete snow-meteorological measurements are daily performed (AINEVA-CAI Model 1) while automatic stations also measure the snow cover thickness, as well as classical meteorological parameters

Energy bursts in fiber bundle models of composite materials

As a model of composite materials, a bundle of many fibers with stochastically distributed breaking thresholds for the individual fibers is considered. The bundle is loaded until complete failure to capture the failure scenario of composite materials under external load. The fibers are assumed to share the load equally, and to obey Hookean elasticity right up to the breaking point. We determine the distribution of bursts in which an amount of energy $E$ is released. The energy distribution follows asymptotically a universal power law $E^{-5/2}$, for any statistical distribution of fiber strengths. A similar power law dependence is found in some experimental acoustic emission studies of loaded composite materials.Comment: 5 pages, 4 fig

Acoustic Emission from crumpling paper

From magnetic systems to the crust of the earth, many physical systems that exibit a multiplicty of metastable states emit pulses with a broad power law distribution in energy. Digital audio recordings reveal that paper being crumpled, a system that can be easily held in hand, is such a system. Crumpling paper both using the traditional hand method and a novel cylindrical geometry uncovered a power law distribution of pulse energies spanning at least two decades: (exponent 1.3 - 1.6) Crumpling initally flat sheets into a compact ball (strong crumpling), we found little or no evidence that the energy distribution varied systematically over time or the size of the sheet. When we applied repetitive small deformations (weak crumpling) to sheets which had been previously folded along a regular grid, we found no systematic dependence on the grid spacing. Our results suggest that the pulse energy depends only weakly on the size of the paper regions responsible for sound production.Comment: 12 pages of text, 9 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. E, additional information availible at http://www.msc.cornell.edu/~houle/crumpling

PROPOSAL FOR AN AUTO-UPDATING SNOWFALL MAP OF THE TRENTINE TERRITORY (EASTERN ALPS OF ITALY)

From the early 80s, the “Snow, Avalanches and Meteorology Office of Trento (Italy) Autonomous Province” (“Ufficio Neve,Valanghe e Meteorologia della Provincia Autonoma di Trento”), actually “Ufficio Previsione e Prevenzione” monitors the snowfall conditions and studies avalanches in the same territory; in particular, it manages a network of over 30 manual snow fields, plus about ten automatic measurement stations, added during the last 10 years, between 800 and 2750 meters (Fig. 1). Complete snow-meteorological measurements are daily performed (AINEVA-CAI Model 1) while automatic stations also measure the snow cover thickness, as well as classical meteorological parameters