Pia Ruttner-Jansen

WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF

Snow avalanches threaten people and infrastructure in mountainous areas. For the assessment of temporal protection measures of infrastructure in dangerous situations, local and up to date information is crucial. One factor influencing the avalanche situation is wind drifted snow, which causes variations in snow depth across a slope, but this data i...

In this paper, we present a sensitivity analysis of RAMMS::EXTENDED, a numerical software for avalanche simulations that includes the reconstruction of the avalanche core and powder cloud. It is a further developed version of the well known avalanche simulation tool RAMMS::AVALANCHE. Our results are based on the reconstruction of an avalanche that...

Since people have been living in mountain regions, they are threatened by the danger of snow avalanches. Critical situations may require the closure of traffic routes or the evacuation of settlements as temporary risk mitigation measures. However, the decision-making experts currently have only limited data to base their decision on. A crucial para...

Accurate registration of TLS (Terrestrial Laser Scanner) point clouds is essential for unbiased determination of deformations in long-range geomonitoring. We evaluated the performance of several established registration methods in an ongoing geomonitoring case study. Our results showed that the ICP (Iterative Closest Point)-based methods specifical...

Based on estimated uncertainties, we perform a statistical sensitivity analysis of almost 30 years of vertical GNSS displacements for 250 European stations and 1600 stations in the Western U.S.. We outline the achievable improvements in station velocity (“trend”) sensitivity after correcting for geophysical loadings, and show challenges in quality...

Terrestrial laser scanners (TLSs) offer a possibility for more automated and efficient deformation monitoring of civil engineering structures with higher spatial resolution than standard methods, as well as without the necessity of permanently installing the monitoring equipment. In such applications, scanners are usually placed so that the lines o...

Long-term Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) height residual time series contain signals that are related to environmental influences. A big part of the residuals can be explained by environmental surface loadings, expressed through physical models. This work aims to find a model that connects raw meteorological parameters with the GNSS resi...

How small ground movements can be to be detected with GNSS?