Assessment the risk of snow avalanche in the North of Italy

The study of avalanche events is particularly important to assess and predict the degree of risk involved in a given area and time. In this work we propose an alternative methodology based on a space-time point process where the intensity function indicates the limiting expected rate of occurrence of snow avalanches occurring on day t at location (x, y), conditioned on the historical information available prior to time t. Also, we use a self-exciting model to deal with unobserved random space-time effects. The model depends also on some environmental variables (degree of slope, exposure, altitude, etc.) which may be considered as covariates. To show the ability of the model in estimating and forecasting the avalanche hazard we consider the application to the digitalized Avalanche Database of the Trentino region, Italy.