Abstract
There is a lack of studies on social needs of information system for snow and ice disaster prevention, while many studies have been carried out on its technological components. I analyzed some regional characteristics of information gathering and /or offering for snow and ice disaster prevention by municipalities, paying attention to the relationship with meteorological and social conditions. Data from a mail survey to 965 municipalities of the snowy area of Japan were utilized. Two pairs of contrastive categories, information of natural phenomena vs. information of social situation and fact information vs. guideline information, played an important role in the analysis. Results are as follows. Contents of gathered information intensely relate meteorological and climatic conditions, namely depth of snow cover, degree of chilliness, and climatic zone. Information offering to regional communities as an open system is very insufficient, especially in the sector of guideline information.
