Abstract
Each year in Carpathian and Sudety Mountain areas snow avalanches cause great number of accidents. Destructive element brings not only casualties, but also significant forest and infrastructure damage.
GIS technology is widely used for research on snow avalanches, mainly for creating avalanche risk and hazard maps. Recent studies show that there are many problems with obtaining satisfactory results for smaller avalanches which make significant amount of total recorded cases.
The analyses which were made for chosen Polish mountain ranges showed that these problems strictly depend on quality and resolution of digital data. The main goal of this study is to compare different types of Digital Elevation Models (DEM), especially with high resolution DEM generated from Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) - Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS), Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS), and terrestrial photogrammetric in context of estimating potential avalanche release areas and making run-out calculations.
Study shows how different digital data may influence predictions' results and procedures. Test sites in the Karkonosze Mountains, Sudety and the Tatra Mountains in Carpathian Mountains were selected for this study.