Presenting our latest snow & water Digital Twins for a renewable energy future

Update from our R&D Team

When it comes to gauging snow height (or depth), point measurements and very coarse maps have been the norm, however our latest high resolution, spatially distributed datasets are set to be especially useful…

This defined resolution would be of special interest to those involved in site location assessments for new solar plants in areas affected by snow, and has been achieved through the machine learning based data fusion of multiple geospatial data sources:

Snow Height is derived by combining the Wegaw snow cover extent (SCE) product, and a specialized processing chain for snow height retrieval from Copernicus Sentinel-1 with in-situ measurements from the Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology (Meteoswiss), and the Intercantonal Measurement and Information System (IMIS).

10m Resolution Snow Height<br />
Made Possible with Wegaw's Unique<br />
Snowpack Digital Twin Insights

10m resolution Snow Height now mossible with our unique Snowpack Digital Twin Insights. The above shows Wegaw high resolution Snow Height data maps in 3D and 2D, visualised over an area of interest in the Davos region in Switzerland in the winter of 2020.

High resolution snow for solar. Data validation

Our multi-disciplinary, talented R&D team have developed a daily snow water equivalent (SWE) and Snow Height (HS) digital twin, that delivers spatially distributed values at 100m horizontal resolution, at country scale from October 2017 to the current day.

Whilst Snow Water Equivalent (SWE) is derived from the snow height time series using a multi-layer snow model that takes into account both generic and locally calibrated snow properties.

The SWE digital twin is currently providing both historical and near-real-time data to multiple hydropower stakeholders across Switzerland and can be utilized for specific sites or scaled up to national coverage.

Snow & Water Digital Twin for the Hydropower Ecosystem on a National Scale

Snow & Water Digital Twin for the Swiss hydropower ecosystem on a national scale

We are proud to offer energy stakeholders and climate resilience thought-leaders an automated holistic view of a nation’s future water availability. For instance, the above represents what may be created with 6 years+ worth of data thanks to our unqiue fusion of historical and near-real-time geospatial data.

Thomas James

CTO, Wegaw

Moving forward, our technical team will continue to work towards scaling the Swiss Digital Water Twin to a world-wide solution to deliver value in water management that would help to mitigate water scarcity.

Still curious?

Check out our latest webinar episodes to find out about our Snow & Water digital twin products for solar site assessments and hydropower production & trading optimization…

Wegaw - SmartHelio - Webinar Episode 3 Deck Cover
Wegaw - Alpiq - Hydrique - Webinar Episode 2 Deck Cover

Any questions?

You may contact the Wegaw R&D team at info@wegaw.com or via our contact form.

For more updates, follow our latest developments via LinkedIn page.