Abruzzo Topographic Map

Winter activities in mountainous regions that experience snowfalls and a seasonal snow cover are always affected by avalanche risk.

The avalanche risk can be mitigated by a careful evaluation of the snowpack characteristics, orography and tree cover density.

Avalanche bulletins of Meteomont service provide daily important informations about the snowpack stability and the dangerous elevations and expositions. A careful evaluation of the avalanche bulletin can mitigate the risk during the tour, nevertheless it’s fundamental to observe the snowpack while proceeding, because it provides informations of the stability conditions right at the tour location.

It’s also important to know the orography and the tree cover density at the tour location, because slope and forest density are key variables to asses the avalanche risk and have to be taken into account to plan the tour before starting it. The informations obtained observing the terrain and the tree cover are also fundamental and have to be integrated with the ones obtained from the map during the tour planning.

It’s really useful to follow the lessons of the White Risk portal to learn how to plan a mountain winter tour and how to behave during it.

For Abruzzo region it’s possible to plan the tour online using a topographic map that includes several layers: i) a slope layer obtained from a DEM provided by Istituto NazionaIe di Geofisica e Vulcanologia at 10 meters resolution; ii) a tree cover layer provided by Copernicus at 10 meters resolution; iii) a snow cover layer showing the presence or absence of snow combining satellite observations of the past 6 days provided again by Copernicus; iv) two layers that show the avalanches corresponding to the photointerpretation (orange color) and to the direct survey (purple color) present in the Avalanche Hazard Location Map (C.L.P.V.), provided by the Abruzzo region portal. Slope classes, tree cover and snow cover layers are not representative of the terrain conditions at scales smaller than the respective resolution, however they provide useful data to plan the tour. It is also crucial to observe the snowpack and the terrain characteristics during the tour to obtain a more precise information.

The users take full responsibility for using the topographic map for outdoor activities.

Oruxmaps integration:

• To use the slope class layer with Oruxmaps, download this file and copy it's content to the onlinemapsources.xml file.