Detailed and fast remote observation of snow for tourism

The DeFROST product is a near real-time snow monitoring service for Digital Outdoor Platforms (websites and smartphone apps) as well as mountain tourism offices (Destination Marketing Organizations). The service aims at providing digital snow maps and data daily at 20m resolution. Based on the combination of satellite and ground data, DeFROST intends to provide daily, accurate information on snow cover and snow depth to support Destinations in developing, promoting and managing their touristic offer as well as Digital Outdoor Platforms to further monetize their community. The service is addressed mainly to Digital Outdoor Platforms providing adventure-planning and mapping services to end-users (tourists) as well as Destination Marketing Organizations operating in mountainous regions. The space assets used for the snow cover products include Earth observation data from the European Sentinel family, including all automatically available Sentinel-2 data+H123. Furthermore, NASA’s operating VIIRS as well as both MODIS Aqua and Terra sensors are included. This procedure, generating daily global maps on snow cover and depth, outranks currently available methods used in the Tourism Industry in terms of scale, reliability and complexity.