Project duration

01.01.2023–30.06.2025

Project description

Around 70% of European ski slopes are prepared with artificial snow. Until now, however, precise snow depth measurement covering an entire ski area has not been financially viable. The aim of the research project GreenSki is to develop a precise and cost-effective snow depth measurement system with high area coverage and daily updates so that ski resorts can base their technical snow production on robust forecasts. This minimizes costs, resource consumption and carbon emissions for ski resorts.

To achieve this goal, the project investigates the feasibility of an advanced observation technology based on Machine Learning (ML)-algorithms using crowdsourcing smartphone GNSS data from skiers in combination with interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data from Sentinel-1A and ICEYE satellites. The training and test data of the algorithms will be gathered at the two ski resorts Val d‘Isere, France, and Kreischberg, Austria. The final goal is to develop a novel snow management platform that provides 3D-snow terrain models. The core innovation is our snow depth measurement solution for ski resorts that offers a spatial vertical resolution in the 10 cm range and a temporal resolution of 4-8 hours.

This project is a collaboration between the companies SkiBro and derstatistiker and JOANNEUM RESEARCH. SkiBro contributes its expertise in the ski and winter sports industry, derstatistiker specializes in the evaluation of statistical data, while JOANNEUM RESEARCH contributes its expertise in sensor data analysis.