Snow avalanches range among the most prominent natural hazards which threaten mountain communities worldwide. This session is devoted to avalanche formation, forecasting and detection, and the dynamics of dense and powder snow avalanches and their accompanying transitional regimes. The first focus is on improving our understanding of avalanche formation processes and to foster the application to avalanche forecasting. We therefore welcome contributions from novel field, laboratory and numerical studies on topics including, but not limited to, the mechanical properties of snow, snow cover simulations, snow instability assessment, meteorological driving factors including drifting and blowing snow, spatial variability, avalanche release mechanics, remote avalanche detection and avalanche forecasting. The second focus is the interaction of snow avalanches with, and impact on, vulnerable elements, such as buildings, protection dams, forests, and roads. We welcome novel contributions from field, laboratory and numerical studies on topics including, but not limited to, avalanche dynamics and related processes, physical vulnerability of structures impacted by snow avalanches, avalanche hazard zoning and avalanche mitigation strategies. Furthermore, we solicit novel contributions from the field of granular flows, viscoplastic flows, density currents, turbulent flows, as well as contributions from other gravity flows communities, which can improve our understanding and modeling of snow avalanche propagation and their interaction with natural or man-made structures.