sarp.snowprofile.alignment - Snow Profile Alignment, Aggregation, and Clustering
Snow profiles describe the vertical (1D) stratigraphy of
layered snow with different layer characteristics, such as
grain type, hardness, deposition date, and many more. Hence,
they represent a data format similar to multivariate time
series containing categorical, ordinal, and numerical data
types. Use this package to align snow profiles by matching
their individual layers based on Dynamic Time Warping (DTW).
The aligned profiles can then be assessed with an independent,
global similarity measure that is geared towards avalanche
hazard assessment. Finally, through exploiting data aggregation
and clustering methods, the similarity measure provides the
foundation for grouping and summarizing snow profiles according
to similar hazard conditions. In particular, this package
allows for averaging large numbers of snow profiles with DTW
Barycenter Averaging and thereby facilitates the computation of
individual layer distributions and summary statistics that are
relevant for avalanche forecasting purposes. For more
background information refer to Herla, Horton, Mair, and
Haegeli (2021) <doi:10.5194/gmd-14-239-2021>, Herla, Mair, and
Haegeli (2022) <doi:10.5194/tc-16-3149-2022>, and Horton,
Herla, and Haegeli (2024) <doi:10.5194/egusphere-2024-1609>.
