How to find the closest snow to you?

In English Sentinel-2 snow-ice THEIA

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].

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

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 […]

Sentinel-2 reveals the surface deformation after the 2025 Myanmar earthquake

Sentinel-2 captured several clear-sky images of Myanmar before and after the 28 March 2025 earthquake. The animation below shows a 5-day apart sequence of images captured by Sentinel-2B and Sentinel-2C (10 m resolution) near the epicenter located close to Mandalay. The surface slip due to the earthquake follows the Sagaing Fault, a major fault in […]

Evolution de l’altitude de la ligne de neige au cours des 41 dernières années dans le bassin versant du Vénéon (Oisans)

Pour contribuer à caractériser les conditions hydrométéorologiques lors de la crue torrentielle qui a frappé la Bérarde en juin, j’ai analysé une nouvelle série de cartes d’enneigement qui couvre la période 1984-2024 [1]. Grâce à la profondeur temporelle de cette série, on constate que l’altitude de la ligne de neige dans le bassin versant du […]

Rechercher