Parks Canada has unveiled a new, more graphical and user-friendly system of public avalanche bulletins which is now available to backcountry travellers through the Canadian Avalanche Centre (CAC) website.

The new format for delivering information about avalanche risk was unveiled on Nov. 9, when the federal government also announced that it would renew funding to the CAC in the amounts of $400,000 over the next four years through Parks Canada and $225,000 over the next three years through Meteorological Service Canada.

The new, online avalanche bulletins now rely less on large blocks of text and create a more interactive graphic-user interface.

“It’s going to look quite different than it has in the past,” said Garth Lemke, a visitor safety specialist with Jasper National Park. “It’ll be more icon-based. You can look at it on different levels.”

The new design is meant to be simpler and clearer for novice backcountry travellers, Lemke added, but it will also allow those with more experience to drill down for more advanced avalanche information.

“The more you want to know the more you can tease out of it,” he said.

The new system still uses the North American Avalanche Danger Scale, which has become an established standard for communicating avalanche risk in a consistent and relatively easy-to-understand way, with ratings and associated colours and icons to express risk levels of low, moderate, considerable, high and extreme at various altitudes in a given region.

Additional information on specific problem areas, such as wind slabs or weak layers on particular aspects, is also included, as are warnings about terrain hazards and general advice for backcountry travel.

The new system has also been designed to be more compatible with mobile phones.

Parks Canada produces daily public avalanche bulletins for Jasper during avalanche season, as well as for Banff, Yoho, Kootenay, and Glacier national parks. Avalanche bulletins are published twice weekly for Waterton Lakes National Park.

Avalanche bulletins are available online through the CAC website www.avalanche.ca or the Parks Canada website avalanche.pc.gc.ca