Yesterday, we posted a new preprint to engrXiv:

J. K. Moore, B. Cloud, M. Hubbard, and C. A. Brown, "Analysis and Ethical Design of Terrain Park Jumps for Snow Sports," Preprint, Mar. 2021. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.31224/osf.io/sq7u9.

The abstract reads:

Most American snowsport resorts now have terrain parks and decades-long epidemiological evidence correlates terrain park use with injuries. Engineering design of jumps could reduce injuries by limiting equivalent fall heights (EFHs), which indicate dissipated landing impact energy. No evidence refutes making terrain park jumps safer in this way. We discuss case studies illustrating that large EFHs are significant factors in traumatic injuries on terrain park jumps. Standards and design tools for builders can make jumps safer. We introduce a tool that can evaluate existing jumps as well as design jump profiles with safer equivalent EFHs to reduce injuries.

In the paper, we attempt to strengthen the arguments for adopting jump design standards for public use snow sports jumps. We show how bad jumps can be through two case studies that resulted in two individuals being paralyzed. We then highlight the large amount of epidemiological studies that continue to show the high dangers associated with these jumps and point out that the scientific literature is also polluted with studies that attempt to cloud the reality of the dangers; favoring ski industry and insurance companies desires. Lastly, we discuss the latest release of our software, skijumpdesign, which has new features that let jump builders analyze existing or planned jumps by equivalent fall height calculations. These features were used to analyse the two case studies in the paper.