Digital Avalanche Rescue Dog
Galileo satellite artist impression. (ESA)
A novel geolocation system makes use of signals from Galileo, the future European satellite navigation system, to locate avalanche victims carrying an avalanche transceiver or a cellphone, to the precision of a few centimeters.
For many skiers and snowboarders, there is nothing quite like being the first to make tracks in the virgin snow, off the regular piste. But this can be a fateful decision, because the risk of avalanche is many times greater here.
Once buried under a mass of snow, a person’s only hope of survival is if their location can be pinpointed swiftly. If not rescued within half an hour, their chances of being found alive diminish rapidly. Victims stand the best chance of being saved if the uninjured members of their group start searching for them immediately – but for that the buried victim needs to be wearing an avalanche beacon.
“In the experience of rescue teams not everyone actually carrys beacons,” says Wolfgang Inninger of the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics IML. “However, nearly everyone has a cellphone. This is why we decided to enhance our automatic geolocation system that works with Galileo, the future European satellite navigation system.” (more…)
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New Method to Measure Snow, Soil Moisture With GPS May Benefit Meteorologists, Farmers
CU-Boulder aerospace engineering sciences Professor Kristine Larson,
A research team led by the University of Colorado at Boulder has found a clever way to use traditional GPS satellite signals to measure snow depth as well as soil and vegetation moisture, a technique expected to benefit meteorologists, water resource managers, climate modelers and farmers.
The researchers have developed a technique that uses interference patterns created when GPS signals that reflect off of the ground — called “multipath” signals — are combined with signals that arrive at the antenna directly from the satellite, said CU-Boulder aerospace engineering sciences Professor Kristine Larson, who is leading the study. Since such multipath signals arrive at GPS receivers “late,” they have generally been viewed as noise by scientists and engineers and have largely been ignored, said Larson, who is leading a multi-institution research effort on the project.
In one recent demonstration, the team was able to correlate changes in the multipath signals to snow depth by using data collected at a field site in Marshall, Colo. just south of Boulder, which was hit by two large snowstorms over a three-week span in March and April of 2009. Published in the September issue of Geophysical Research Letters, the snowpack study built on a project Larson and her colleagues have been working on that is funded by the National Science Foundation to measure soil moisture using GPS receivers. (more…)
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New Celestial Map Gives Directions for GPS
by Bill Steigerwald, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
An artist's concept of a quasar (bright area with rays) embedded in the center of a galaxy. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle)
Many of us have been rescued from unfamiliar territory by directions from a Global Positioning System (GPS) navigator. GPS satellites send signals to a receiver in your GPS navigator, which calculates your position based on the location of the satellites and your distance from them. The distance is determined by how long it took the signals from various satellites to reach your receiver.
The system works well, and millions rely on it every day, but what tells the GPS satellites where they are in the first place?
“For GPS to work, the orbital position, or ephemeris, of the satellites has to be known very precisely,” said Dr. Chopo Ma of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “In order to know where the satellites are, you have to know the orientation of the Earth very precisely.” (more…)
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