Special Avalanche Warnings at the Canadian Avalanche Centre
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This poster describes the Special Public Avalanche Warning Program. The Canadian Avalanche Centre with the support of the British Columbia Provincial Emergency Program issues Special Public Avalanche Warnings for times when winter backcountry travellers are expected to face elevated avalanche risk. The decision to issue a warning follows established criteria that capture periods when recreationists’ perception of risk won’t map well onto existing or forecast conditions. Because of the focus on perception, our analysis incorporates both physical and human factors to anticipate the need for issuing a special warning. Integrating both traditional avalanche forecasting factors and insights into the psychology of decision making means warnings are rarely issued during periods of high avalanche activity. Common profiles for issuing warnings will be described. Special Public Avalanche Warnings are infrequently issued, carefully targeted messages that remain in effect for a short period of time. They cover carefully defined geographic areas and target specific backcountry user groups. Warnings identify specific avalanche safety issues and provide guidance for how to improve your chances for a safe recreational experience. They consist of: notifying partner agencies; a press release; a targeted media campaign; an avalanche forecast, report, or warning product and update as required by changing conditions, and; avalanche forecaster availability for media and public enquiries. We feel the Special Public Avalanche Warning program may be one of our most effective communication devices that assist our users successfully manage their avalanche risks.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".