Avalanche Burial- There’ll be an App for that
January 6th, 2010Posted in Skiing Everywhere
Recently my cell phone unexpectedly chirped while I was deep in the Colorado backcountry. I was surprised that there was reception and my mind began wondering if any clever people were working on making cell phones useful in avalanche search and rescue since most skiers have cell phones in their pockets even when they don’t have avalanche transceivers. Silly thought- of course they are!
Last month Medical News Today reported on research where a new geolocation system designed to work with the next generation of European GPS satellites has proven accurate to within a few centimeters in locating victims with either a cell phone or an avalanche transceiver.
This is great news on several levels. In a few years virtually all cell phones will be smart phones having a sophisticated display screen capable of showing in real time, on a large scale satellite photograph or topomap, the location of the user and the location of a buried victim and accurately indicating the distance and direction to the victim, plus the victim’s depth. Rescuers should then be able to orient their phone to the map’s designated direction to the victim, run the prescribed distance and dig to the right depth.
In addition to increasing speed and accuracy in locating victims, the number of victims buried without a location signaling device will be greatly reduced while the number of potential rescuers in the vicinity will be greatly increased since having a cell phone will be almost ubiquitous.
A couple of years ago Canadian researchers tested the strength of cellphone GPS signals from locations under avalanche debris and found there was adequate signal strength from a depth of almost 9 feet.
Now that Google is bringing its technical and financial resources to the smart phone world, since it already has a huge map and satellite image datebase, plus an army of smart software engineers many of whom surely are skiers and backcountry skiers, can a slick, simple to use and very accurate location application be far in the future? I doubt it.
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