Abstract
Decisions to close the Little Cottonwood Canyon Highway to vehicular traffic are made by avalanche forecasters. These decisions are based on professional experience and on careful monitoring of the prevailing conditions. Considerable data on weather and snowpack conditions exist. These data are informally employed by the forecasters in the road closure decision but presently they do not use formal statistical methods. This paper attempts a more formal statistical analysis to determine to whether this might facilitate the road closure decision. The conclusion is that the statistical model provides information relevant to the road closure decision that is not identical to that of the experts. When the expert decision is augmented by the statistical information, better decisions are reached compared with decisions based on either the expert opinion alone or the statistical model.
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© 1995 Springer-Verlag New York, Inc.
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Blattenberger, G., Fowles, R. (1995). Road Closure: Combining Data and Expert Opinion. In: Gatsonis, C., Hodges, J.S., Kass, R.E., Singpurwalla, N.D. (eds) Case Studies in Bayesian Statistics, Volume II. Lecture Notes in Statistics, vol 105. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-2546-1_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-2546-1_6
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