This is the 6th lecture of Winter School 2025!

This lecture will take place on campus in room 1-190 from 7pm to 9pm.

Guest Lecturer: Patrick Scanlan

Patrick is a mountain safety professional with over 10 years of experience in mountain ranges across North America and Europe. Currently, he is an avalanche forecaster and the assistant director of the US Forest Service Mount Washington Avalanche Center. In this role, he is tasked with accurately assessing and effectively communicating the avalanche hazard to a broad user group of skiers, snowboarders, climbers, and hikers. Additionally, Patrick is part of a team that leads and executes technical mountain rescue operations on Mount Washington.

Since this doesn’t keep him busy enough, Patrick is also a part-time graduate student in Carnegie Mellon’s Integrated Innovation Institute, scheduled to graduate next December.

Talk description This talk will dive deep into avalanche science, avalanche forecasting frameworks & strategy, and human decision making in avalanche terrain. Audience members can expect to hear a refresher of avalanche basics, understand how avalanche forecasters use data and manage uncertainty to create an accurate, effective avalanche forecast, and work through a forecasting excercise to create their own avalanche forecast based on real-time data.