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Record W4408384554 · doi:10.5194/nhess-25-1113-2025

The Avalanche Terrain Exposure Scale (ATES) v.2

2025· article· en· W4408384554 on OpenAlex
Grant Statham, Cam Campbell

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.

Bibliographic record

VenueNatural hazards and earth system sciences · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPsychology
TopicSafety Warnings and Signage
Canadian institutionsSimon Fraser UniversityParks Canada
Fundersnot available
KeywordsTerrainEnvironmental scienceScale (ratio)Hydrology (agriculture)GeologyGeotechnical engineeringGeographyCartography

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract. The Avalanche Terrain Exposure Scale (ATES) is a classification system that communicates avalanche terrain severity to different target audiences. ATES is a static terrain rating method that is independent of avalanche hazard, so the ratings do not change with the weather and snow conditions. The system was originally introduced in Canada in 2004 as a risk management tool for public avalanche safety programs and uses two synonymous methods: one for terrain assessment and another for public communication. The ATES method applies technical specifications for assessing avalanche terrain to determine ratings, and it is paired with communication models to convey those terrain ratings to different user groups. ATES ratings are found in guidebooks and route descriptions or are displayed spatially as zones on a map, and they have been widely applied to public safety programs and workplace avalanche safety plans. This paper introduces ATES v.2, a revised and updated system that merges the two previous ATES models into a single method that (1) expands the original version from three levels to five by including Class 0 (Non-avalanche terrain) and Class 4 (Extreme terrain), (2) removes glaciation as an input parameter, and (3) introduces a communication model for waterfall ice climbing. The ATES technical specifications are reviewed in detail, along with guidance on their application by field-based practitioners and desktop-based Geographic Information System (GIS) users. The use of both manual and automated ATES assessment methods is discussed, along with methods for presenting ATES ratings to the target audience. This paper addresses a gap in the literature with respect to avalanche terrain classification for backcountry travel. After 20 years of use in different jurisdictions and countries, the ATES method has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. This publication seeks to correct that and establish a baseline reference for ATES upon which future terrain-based products and research can build.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Other design · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.821
Threshold uncertainty score0.815

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.008
GPT teacher head0.282
Teacher spread0.275 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it