How to find the closest snow to you?

Simon Gascoin, 21 novembre 2019

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].

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.

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