The final product will be an advanced live-map of mountain hazards for Europe and the world – integrating complementary Earth observation sources (e.g. crowdsourcing, satellite). Important outcomes will be a major upscaling at national and international scale as well as a large user uptake across public and private markets.

The plan is to release a first beta version of MountaiNow premium by spring 2022, leading to public release in early summer.

Benefits of the pilot will be multi-dimensional:  Social – Saved lives and less accidents or situations of distress; Economic – higher number of clients for tourism services; and Environmental/Scientific – advanced monitoring of mountain areas and related hazards (e.g. landslides, glacial lake outbursts).

The development cycle will be divided into iterations, building on the user-driven elements below. Testing of beta versions will be performed by complementary user profiles (e.g. occasional mountain goer, professional mountain guide). This approach will be applied until convergence is reached and final verifications can be undertaken leading to public release.

As soon as MountaiNow premium is ready for public release, it will become available as a mobile app (android, iOS) on the usual appstores.

MountaiNow is a live-map of hazards created to meet one of the biggest needs of mountain lovers and tourism actors: Knowing the latest evolution of glacier ice, snow cover, rock surface, or earth trails – for optimal safety. The methodology applied here builds on strong user-driven components, for instance individual users assisting with the design and improvements of the app, and user communities helping identify trends in user requirements.  

The pilot should enable a breakthrough in the downstream use and exploitation of complementary data sources such as crowdsourcing and satellites.

Highly innovative is the combination of real-time crowdsourcing, space/satellite insight (Copernicus Sentinel data), Big Data analytics, and guided navigation – offering a new/unique set of actionable information.

Crowdsourced data together with satellite-based products (e.g. snow-depth) will be made available via the MountaiNow mobile app and web-app.

Plans are to register the pilot service in the NextGEOSS service catalogue as well as in any other relevant GEO/GEOSS catalogue.

For the record, MountaiNow was presented by Switzerland to the GEO-XVI Plenary/Ministerial Summit (Canberra, Australia, November 2019) as a key contribution to the Group on Earth Observations (GEO). MountaiNow also contributes to the GEO-GNOME initiative “Observing mountain environments”.