OpenSlopeMap: Slope map by skiers for skiers

The project was launched by me with the support of Reini Riedl. We are not only enthusiastic freeriders and ski tourers but also very interested in technology (Reini has a degree in computer science, I have a degree in physics) and work in professional software development. At some point, we started working on the subject of slope gradient maps. Some of the slope maps we knew up to that point were quite ok, but the available solutions always had some kind of limitation. Sometimes it is the poor resolution, sometimes the maps are only accessible in a relatively cumbersome way (such as the good maps on the unfortunately rather cumbersome web GIS pages of Tyrol and Salzburg), or you can't just use them for offline use as well.

At first, we only did the whole thing on a very small scale and created small-scale map sections for each of the activities we had planned. As it would have been a shame if only the two of us had used these maps, we decided last winter to make the maps available to the general public, free of charge and without any commercial interests. So this year I set up the OpenSlopeMap project and have been generating the map for the Eastern Alps over the past few months. You can use the maps in your browser, but you can also download ready-made map files for offline use, e.g. on a smartphone. We wanted to create something meaningful and we would be delighted if the community took up the offer and hopefully many like-minded people will be able to enjoy the map.

Every user of the map should be aware that a map can only ever be a limited view of the real conditions and can therefore never fully represent the actual conditions!

Maps of Switzerland can be found here.

UPDATE 2017

Of course, we weren't lazy over the snow-poor summer months and have implemented a few very interesting new features for the OpenSlopeMap. The most important changes are as follows:

1. we have now been able to create slope gradient maps with a significantly higher slope gradient for the provinces of Tyrol, Salzburg, Vorarlberg and South Tyrol. The slope inclination maps are based on digital terrain models (DTM for short) with an accuracy of 5m. Until now, we could only create data based on DTMs with an accuracy of 10m. So far, these exact 5m-DTMs are only available for the countries mentioned. As soon as other countries follow suit, we will also take them into account accordingly. These are now our "High Resolution"maps.

2. For Austria, South Tyrol and Trentino, we have created slope maps based on DTMs that are based on the 10m data, but which have been recalculated to a higher accuracy (somewhere between 5m and 10m) using the bicubic interpolation method. These are now our "Medium Resolution"maps.

3. As you could already see above, we have now also covered the Trentino with our "Medium Resolution"maps.

4. We have slightly revised the degree classification for slopes over 40°. On the one hand, we have extended the differentiation up to 55°, on the other hand, we have optimized the colour scale for better differentiation.