Researchers at ETH Zurich have developed an artificial intelligence that can use satellite images to determine snow depth across Switzerland. This method is more accurate and faster than previous methods, the university announced on Thursday.
Until now, snow monitoring in Switzerland has mainly been based on data from measuring stations. Because there are only about 400 stations for the whole of Switzerland, snow information for many places is quite inaccurate, it was said.
For the measurement with satellite images, researchers from ETH Zurich and the Swiss company Exolabs used images from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel 2 satellites, which record images every five days for every location on Earth. In addition to the satellite images, the AI was also fed with extensive terrain data from Switzerland.
“New standard for snow depth measurement”
Using the satellite and terrain data, the AI was eventually trained to infer the snow depth for each point. To do this, the researchers first had the system estimate snow depth and compared the results to real snow measurements. “We determined at each grid point how far the AI deviated from its estimate and gradually adjusted the system so that the errors became smaller,” Konrad Schindler explains in the ETH statement.
“While the best existing snow maps in Switzerland have an effective resolution of about 250 by 250 meters, on our maps you can zoom in to ten by ten meters to read the snow depth,” says Schindler. “We assume that we are setting a new standard for snow depth measurements in Switzerland.”
Source: Krone
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