A Review of Russian Snow Avalanche Models—From Analytical Solutions to Novel 3D Models

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Some typing errors should be taken up during proof reading.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors, I can congratulate you on the work you have accomplished. Therefore, it is my pleasure to recommend its acceptance.

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper presents a nice review of the avalanche model developments in the former Soviet-Union (especially in the period 1960-1990) and Russia until present. The paper describes briefly a series of interesting theoretical approaches and shows their developments. It is understandable that this kind review paper can not be totally self-contained. On the other hand, this makes it for non-Russian speaking reader difficult to obtain the required additional information as most of the original papers are hard to obtain and are written in Russian. Hence, once in a while, the reader of the review may wishes to have more information about the background of the presented numerical experiments. For example, it seems to me that Table 1 is taken out of context.

The section about the missing experiments is to my opinion to general and needs be placed in the historical and spatial (Soviet Union and Russia) context. In recent years there have come up more Avalanche observations that could be used to verify and constrain the proposed model approaches.

With that in mind, the conclusion seem to be rather superficial. To my opinion it should provide some ideas about which kind of data are really needed to verify or falsify the proposed model approaches.

The paper is well written; here and there, a native speaker could improve the English a bit.

At some place there seems to be an inconsistent use of symbols.

Please check reference list of correctness and completeness.

Some more specific remarks can be in the attachment.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

It is an interesting paper that covers the evolution of some mathematical models of snow avalanches from Soviet Union and Russia. These models were published in paper not widely available due to the source of publication and the language. I appreciated the deep description of these model, that include an interesting description of entrainment and friction. I suggest to update the conclusions (too short fro such a good paper), and as far as it is possible, to add a chronology of these model in parallel to a similar one related to simila model from the West side.

Reviewer 3 Report

This article is a thoroughly written review even if it could definitely benefit from some English proof-reading. It definitely deserves publication in Geosciences, however, it can be further improved before it happens.

Let us discuss first the title of this manuscript. Most of the models mentioned in this review date from the period of the Soviet Union. Thus, I would rather see in the title "Soviet" instead of "Russian". Moreover, many different nationalities contributed to this great work. So, I would avoid neglecting their contributions.

In general, the article would benefit a lot if the "soviet models" were put into a more general context. To give an example, the first hydraulic system of Equations (1), (2) is known in the West as Savage-Hutter model. I do not understand why the authors didn't mention it. The same should be done for other models. It would be really nice to see how this science was developed in parallel on both sides of the iron curtain. In the current state of the manuscript, we see only one part of the picture and I would like to see the whole (in the limits of possible, of course).

As a final remark for this round of review, I would ask for an additional section in the present manuscript. The Referee understands that this article is devoted to snow avalanches, however, it is worth to mention, at least in one section, other types of avalanches such as underwater ones. If you ask me why I will tell you that there are many common issues in the modelling of these natural processes. In particular, the determination of the entrainment rates is one of such points and the progress made for one type of avalanches could be beneficially transposed to snow avalanches. As a final remark, the modelling of underwater avalanches had been historically done in Akademgorodok (Novosibirsk) at Lavrentyev Institute of Hydrodynamics. The most recent results regarding this type of processes have been reported in the following two publications:

Liapidevskii, V. Y., Dutykh, D., & Gisclon, M. (2018). On the modelling of shallow turbidity flows. Advances in Water Resources, 113, 310-327. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.advwatres.2018.01.017

Liapidevskii, V., & Dutykh, D. (2019). On the velocity of turbidity currents over moderate slopes. Fluid Dynamics Research, 51, 035501. https://doi.org/10.1088/1873-7005/ab0091

To make a conclusion, this Referee asks for a major revision of the manuscript and I acknowledge its good overall potential to become a good article in the future. However, in the current form, it would be almost pity to publish it since with a little additional work it can be substantially improved to become a great review paper.