Is This the Biggest Breakthrough in Avalanche Technology Yet? | AvaTech:

Avatech is a new company that has developed a digital snow probe used to help analyze snow conditions and give real time feed back to help predict and understand avalanches. This new digital probe is said to be the future of avalanche forecasting and also will give a better and more comprehensive analysis of the snow pack.

From the Avatech website they claim that:

“Our device, using a variety of sensors and algorithms, is designed to detect those problematic layer changes in the snowpack by measuring snow hardness as you probe.”

The big advantage I see with this tool is that it gives an up to date digital feed back to a main data center and with this large amounts of data can be collect fairly fast, analyzed and documented.  This would be extremely useful for large resorts that do large scale avalanche control. Additionally backcountry riders could use this tool and have the data post to website or data base for future riders to review before heading out.

This tool also saves lots of time and effort in digging and analyzing snow pits and thus would increase time spent riding and enjoying the terrain. I have been told that many avalanches forecasting organizations throughout North American are going to invest and test this tool this upcoming winter. Form this I would like to see what they think and there analysis of the tool. This could be the future of avalanche forecasting and hopefully with that comes fewer people caught in slides.