Snow Profile Diagram

Experimental project

This is a sandbox project, which contains experimental code for developer use only.

Provides a drag-and-drop in-brower drawing tool to create and store a snow profile, used in snow safety and avalanche forecasting.

A snow profile is a cross-section diagram of conditions in the snow at a moment in time and a specified location. The symbols and terminology of such diagrams are defined in the IACS 2009 Standard. This module provides a drag-and-drop browser tool to create such a diagram, with the ability to save the finished diagram in the Drupal database as both a PNG file and a data set. The data can be loaded and updated in the browser after initial storage.

The drawing tool provided by this module depends on browser support for SVG and JavaScript code to manipulate SVG entities. The tool works in recent versions of popular browsers, but will not work in many old browsers.

For a general discussion of avalanches and snow safety see Staying Alive In Avalanche Terrain by Bruce Tremper. Snow profiles are described on pp. 175-180 of the second edition.

This module was written pro bono for the Utah Avalanche Center.

SnowPilot is a desktop application that produces a snow profile diagram.
AvaTech is a company that provides a service which includes drawing snow profile diagrams.