How to find the closest snow to you?

If you live in Pamiers near Toulouse, France, where is the snow-covered place that is the fastest accessible by car or by bike?

There is a beautiful snow map of the Pyrenees mountains near Pamiers from a Sentinel-2 image that was acquired yesterday (at the time of writing) [link to the data].

Theia snow cover map on 19 Nov 2019

In QGIS with the OpenRouteService API it is possible to calculate isochrones for a car trip from Pamiers:

This map shows the areas accessible by car from Pamiers in a given period of time (yellow 30-40 min, orange 40-50 min, red 50-60 min)

Finally if we make a spatial join between this map and the vertices of the snow polygons, we obtain the following map:

You can see in yellow the snow-covered places that are the fastest accessible according to OpenRouteService. Here is a zoom near Foix, there is a small road to reach the snow half an hour from Pamiers!

There are other APIs like OpenRouteService, for example that of Google enables to integrate traffic density in the calculation, but this service is not free. Beware that the time to mount the chains on the tires of the car is not taken into account …

You can even change the mode of transportation to calculate the travel time! Here the travel time is calculated for a cyclist from the city center of Foix.

Plus d'actualités

Dates de fauche en France

En 2024, des collègues du Cesbio ont publié un article* sur la cartographie de la date de fauche en France en 2022 à partir des données satellitaires Sentinel-2.   Leur magnifique figure 10 a attiré mon attention. La version à haute résolution fournie avec l’article (2861 × 2911 pixels) correspond à une image dont les pixels font […]

Évolution du jour de déneigement dans les Alpes françaises et les Pyrénées

Les socio-écosystèmes des Alpes et des Pyrénées dépendent étroitement des fluctuations annuelles du manteau neigeux. En particulier, le moment de l’année où la neige disparait détermine le début de la saison de croissance de la végétation de montagne et donc la période des estives. Le changement climatique est en train de bouleverser ce rythme saisonnier. […]

BIOMASS, the third launched satellite mission designed at CESBIO !

After SMOS in 2009, and VENµS in 2017, the CESBIO laboratory is very proud to see its third proposed mission, Biomass, reach orbit. As always, it has been a long journey from the idea, at the beginning of the century, to the selection in 2013 as the seventh Earth Explorer Mission by ESA, to the […]

Rechercher