Abstract
Despite the development of various models simulating the dynamics of snow avalanches, including the mass-point and rigid-body models, existing products are unable to express the change of flow height and spread over the complicated topography. To address these shortcomings, we incorporated the mass flow model TITAN2D, which was originally developed to describe lava flow and landslide dynamics, to simulate snow avalanches. First, we conducted chute flow experiments using three types of granules, including granular snow. Outputs from these experiments include front velocity, maximum height, flow width, and flow distance data, which we then compared with numerical outputs. Although certain differences are inevitable due to the modelʼs assumption of shallow water and difficulties in measuring the bed friction angle accurately, our simulated data exhibit general agreement with the experimental data, indicating that TITAN2D is an effective tool for describing the motion of snow avalanches.
