Avalanche Radar for Road Protection in Styria

At the mountain Grimming in Northern Styria an avalanche endangers an important road. Although this is already protected by a tunnel somelarge avalanches in the recent years have shown that the tunnel does not provide full coverage. Therefore the idea has been born to build a system which detects avalanches and close the road immediately by means of traffic lights. The detection is done by the Pulsed Doppler Avalanche Radar which has been developed at the institute. The system operates without human interaction to provide the necessary fast response times. Nevertheless the radar and the traffic lights are surveillanced at a remote control room. Furthermore an optical surveillance of the road by means of video-cameras is also incorporated into the system.