Chronicle

Improvedthe altitude grid in the meteogram

Every altitude band is now judged on its own. Snow can fall at the summit while it rains a thousand metres lower in the same time window — the bars are coloured accordingly.

The grey line separates the colours where rain turns to snow. It sits a few hundred metres below the freezing level in the “0°” row: falling precipitation cools on the way down and arrives as snow below the zero-degree altitude.

Newweather page and method paper

The weather page uses screenshots from the app to explain what every figure in the meteogram means. The method paper describes every step from the model to the number — with sources, every constant that was set, and an assessment of how well each quantity holds up. In German.

Newsaving tours

A button below the elevation profile puts the tour into the history, uploaded ones and ones drawn in the app alike. A tap brings it back — with its elevation profile and tour check, at once and without a connection. Only what is explicitly saved goes into the history.

Nothing in the app itself this time — this runs on our servers and applies to everyone immediately, without an update.

ImprovedPiedmont and Aosta Valley with their own connection

In early August the environmental agency of Piedmont moved its real-time data to a new access route. Both areas now hang on a source of their own each: 207 stations together instead of 191, and the snow depths come from a data stream the agency validates itself.

Improvedmissing measurements show up the same day

Measuring networks change — access routes are switched, stations disappear. Our monitoring therefore no longer checks only whether a provider responds, but whether its stations actually arrive in the app. If an area drops out, that is established the same day. For planning that means shorter periods in which no measured snow depth is available for a location.

Newemergency location

A button on the map shows where you are standing — in decimal degrees, degrees/minutes and UTM, the three notations an emergency dispatcher may ask for, plus altitude, positioning accuracy and how old it is. This works without a network. On opening, the last known position appears immediately, marked as such, so that nobody has to wait for a fix before being able to pass something on.

Where there is reception, the nearest named point in the terrain is added, for example “600 m northeast of Schwarz Berg (2314 m)”. Dispatchers ask for names, not just for numbers. A name survives the misheard digit on a bad line.

The emergency number follows the area and names the service that actually picks up there. Mountain rescue 140 in Austria, Rega 1414 in Switzerland, 144 in Valais, 118 in Veneto. It opens after two seconds of holding, and dials only after five, so that wet gloves do not trigger an emergency call. topo^alpin does not call by itself and sends no data to a dispatch centre.

FixedSwiss winter map

When switching to winter, Switzerland still showed the summer map. With the “Landeskarte Winter” swisstopo publishes a separate sheet with the marked ski and snowshoe routes drawn in, and that was exactly what was missing. The switch itself worked, only the map beneath it stayed the wrong one. Planning a ski tour therefore lacked the very routes you switch to winter for.

Fixedprivacy policy in the wrong language

The English, French and Italian terms all referred to the German version of the privacy policy. Each language now points to its own.

Improvedthe terrain shading

The shading that gives the mountains their form on the map used to be calculated on the phone itself, anew with every pan. That cost computing time and therefore battery, and on older devices it looked worse. Now it arrives ready-made from the server — the same everywhere, without effort for the device.

It is also no longer the simple shadow calculation of before but a more elaborate shading after the Swiss model, computed once for the whole Alpine arc. It comes from the same workshop as alpine-terrain.org, our showcase map for the Alps.

Improvedall elevations from our own terrain models

Every elevation figure in the app — in the tour profile, on drawn routes, at your own location — now comes from our own terrain models at five metres resolution. Previously the queries ran through various outside services, and where none of them was responsible, a coarse model stepped in that knows an elevation value only every 30 metres. That was enough to place a summit dozens of metres off.

Our own data covers the whole Alpine region. Outside it the app would rather show no elevation than a wrong one.

NewATES for Bavaria

The Bavarian Alps join with around 7900 km² as the sixth region for which the app classifies avalanche terrain.

Fixedlegal texts unreachable on the phone

In the settings the “Legal” tab was cut off on narrow displays. Imprint, privacy policy and terms can now be reached directly from the app on the phone as well.

NewATES for France and Slovenia

The ATES classification now also covers the French Alps with seven departments and the whole of Slovenia. The Tour Check can be used there just as in Italy.

Fixedwrong country attribution for avalanche terrain

On the Austria map the attribution for Italy stood above the avalanche terrain, and for Italy and Slovenia it was missing entirely. It now follows the region of the chosen location instead of the map that happens to lie underneath.

The largest addition since release.

NewTour Check

A loaded tour is calculated against the terrain it runs through. The elevation profile colours itself by risk, and the places where it gets tight can be tapped individually. You can switch between the assessment of the tour and the plain classification of the terrain.

Behind it stand two published methods. ATES v2.0, the Avalanche Terrain Exposure Scale, classifies avalanche terrain by its form alone into four classes — simple, challenging, complex, extreme. It is calculated automatically following AutoATES v2, from slope angle, terrain shape and forest cover. The second method assesses a route in that terrain and combines slope angle, aspect and the danger level from the bulletin. Both method papers are open: avalanche terrain and Tour Check.

The app takes nobody’s judgement on site away from them. It shows where a closer look belongs.

Newdanger level for the case without a bulletin

For areas and periods where no avalanche bulletin exists, the settings let you define which level the Tour Check calculates with instead. Previously the assessment stayed empty there.

A service that fails does not say so by itself. Otherwise the first to notice is someone in the middle of planning a tour — which is the wrong way round.

Newround-the-clock monitoring

Every minute our servers now check themselves: do the place search, the elevation service and the terrain service respond? Are today’s avalanche bulletins there, the snow readings fresh, the weather models current? By now a good two dozen points, each with its own threshold.

The result goes out as a sign of life, to a service outside our servers. The detour is deliberate: monitoring that runs on the same machine falls silent exactly when it matters. If the sign of life stops arriving, an email goes out.

Improvedhow the maps are delivered

A week earlier the cartography had become ours — it was still delivered by outside machines. Since today, both. That means nobody can slow us down when a lot of people plan at the same time on a fine weekend.

Within one week two outside providers fall away that the app had to rely on until then.

Newslopemap HD as the map

Our own cartography with our own slope angle data instead of outside servers that were regularly under load through the winter months and then tore holes in the map. What the slope angle map looks like on its own is shown at slopemap-hd.org.

Newour own weather server

The weather models no longer run through a public service but on a rented machine that holds the data itself. That costs money and brings two things. Nobody caps our number of queries, and we decide ourselves which variables come along from the models.

Plus monitoring that checks per model how old the last run is and reports when one stops delivering fresh data.

Newterrain in the tour profile

Colouring by terrain appears in the elevation profile for the first time.

At release the app still depended on outside providers. Four days later on none.

Improvedplace search, elevations and summit lookup

Place search ran through an outside geocoder, elevation lookup through an outside elevation service, and the summits and huts came from an open OpenStreetMap query interface that regularly gives up under load. All three now run on our own servers.

None of this is visible as long as everything works — and that is exactly the point. Nobody can cap our number of queries, and nobody takes the search down with them when they fail.

Newslope angle meter

The phone measures the steepness of the slope it rests on through its motion sensors. Meant as a cross-check on site, not as a replacement for the map.

Newcompass rose in navigation

Direction to the target and viewing direction in one display. Plus a newly built tour view and settings sorted by topic instead of standing in one long list.

Newlegal texts in French and Italian

Imprint, terms and privacy policy now exist in four languages.

Fixednavigation and handling

The navigation arrow pointed the wrong way, and the width of the navigation display jumped as soon as the distance changed. Also fixed: mailto: links in the legal texts did not open under iOS, map buttons were too small to hit reliably, and GPX export did not go through the system share menu.

In three weeks the meteogram turns into a tour planner. Most of it happens in the first week.

Newthe map

On the second day a map appears alongside, with the weather stations as markers and a map type that follows the country. In the days after come the official maps of France, South Tyrol and Bavaria, plus slope angle as an overlay for Austria and France.

Switzerland gets the densest treatment. On the swisstopo national map lie slope angle from 30° and the slope angle classes, both SLF terrain classifications, and the marked ski and snowshoe routes. Alongside them the hiking trails and everything better left alone in winter: wildlife sanctuaries, game reserves and livestock guardian dogs. Every layer can be switched on individually and dimmed.

Newtours

Upload a GPX file, get an elevation profile, see the highest point of the route with its weather. The profile colours itself by terrain, and a click on it flies the map to that spot. Plus GPS navigation that leads to the summit or along the route. From 9 March a route can also be drawn directly on the map.

Newavalanche situation and weather warnings

The danger level from the official avalanche bulletins, joined in early March by the French ones from Météo-France. A day before release, the MeteoAlarm weather warnings arrive.

Newthe website becomes an app

In early March the web app gets a native shell. What ran in the browser until then becomes an iPhone app — with location access, haptic feedback and the ability to take over a GPX file from another app.

Newfreezing level in the meteogram

A line runs through the meteogram showing how the freezing level moves over the days. It decides whether the forecast precipitation falls as rain or snow — and at what altitude on the slope the boundary between the two lies.

Improvedthe meteogram

Besides the ten-day overview there is now a 48-hour view at finer resolution.

The six models are also no longer averaged equally. ICON and ICON D2 count for more in the Alps than a global model because they resolve the topography more finely. At the same time ECMWF AIFS replaces the Canadian GEM.