Impact performance of standard tabletop and constant equivalent fall height snow park jumps

The theory of snow park jump design that controls landing impact has been developed, but ski resorts have not exploited this advancement, in part, because of questions of practicality. In a first step to provide a proof-of-principle example, we designed and built a novel constant equivalent fall height (EFH) snow park jump at the Tognola Ski Resort in San Martino di Castrozza, Italy. The impact performance of this jump and that of an existing standard tabletop jump were measured using a jumper on a snowboard instrumented with accelerometers. Using only the accelerometer channel perpendicular to the snowboard plane, we were able to estimate the velocity changes at impact perpendicular to the landing surface, the corresponding EFH, and approximate values of the energy absorbed on impact. These were found to be in rough agreement with the theoretical expectations for EFH derived from the measured jump profiles, including trends for the tabletop jump EFH as a function of distance jumped that have been described in the literature.