As Olivier Gardet piloted the drone around the mountain, his colleague, who was looking through goggles connected to its infrared camera, could see the avalanche clearly: a long tongue of debris, visible from 2 kilometers away. Then he noticed the heat signature of a person moving across it, digging frantically in the churned up snow. “I got on the radio,” Gardet remembers, “and I said to dispatch: ‘There must be someone alive under there.
data shows that although yearly death tolls fluctuate, the 10-year mean average has stayed static since the mid-’90s. “Yes it’s more or less the same,” says Patrick Nairz, “and if you check the last 40 years, or the last 20 years, there’s actually a downward trend.” Various technologies have helped play their part in this, he believes, not least improvements in the avalanche forecasting that he and his colleagues undertake.
still gets input from mountain guides and other observers out in the field, but they’ve created a vastly simplified upload mechanism. “Anyone who investigates the snowpack can draw a snow profile, upload it on our web page, and it’s accessible to everyone.” All this has led to the development of snowpack models “nearly exploding,” in recent years, he says.
’s most-used service: a general avalanche forecast for the next 24 hours, published at 5 pm every day throughout the winter months. Covering the whole alpine region and translated into multiple languages, the forecast uses a colored heat map to explain the avalanche danger as well as five easily understandable icons that indicate the causes of potential instability—such as new snow or wet snow, for example—and the particular warning signs to look out for.