ETH Student Project House · Zurich
An alpine snowpack measurement drone — bringing dense, repeatable data to the terrain that avalanche forecasting cannot currently see.
Avalanche forecasting rests on a dataset far thinner than the decisions made from it.
Automated stations measure a handful of points. Human observers reach only what is safe to reach. The places that matter most — steep, wind-loaded release zones — are precisely the places nobody measures.
Forecasters compensate with experience and interpolation, and they do it well. But the underlying spatial picture of the snowpack remains largely inferred rather than observed.
We are not building a better forecast. We are widening the data a forecast can be built on.
Endurance, efficiency and weather resistance sufficient for alpine release zones. Cold, altitude and wind are the design drivers, not afterthoughts. The deliverable is a demonstrated flight envelope — not a concept study.
Repeat surveys producing snow depth against a bare-ground reference, ground-truthed with manual profiles and delivered in a form that existing avalanche models can ingest.
Density and internal layering at slope scale — the properties that drive instability and that neither satellites nor point stations can resolve.
Airframe concepts, propulsion hardware, flight-control software.
Sensor payload, data acquisition hardware, in-flight processing.
Flight-control hardware, project coordination, finance and the regulatory path.
Data pipeline, quality assurance, handover to avalanche models.
Working on snow, hydrology or alpine operations?
We are looking for collaborators, data partners and anyone whose measurement problem overlaps with ours.
info@firn-drone.ch