DeFROST Overview

Get a glimpse of how to integrate DeFROST in your website or mobile app.

You can integrate snow data from DeFROST in two main ways:

DeFROST Maps

The DeFROST Maps allow you to display snow cover and depth as a map and integrates quickly with the most popular mobile & web mapping frameworks. Maps are delivered via the Tiled Map Service standard and allows you to customize the look and feel of the tiles on the fly.

DeFROST Global Snow Map near Vancouver, depicting snow depth on 20th December 2019.

You can read through our quickstart to get started with Leaflet, Mapbox, OpenLayers and Google Maps. Check the DeFROST Maps section for an in-depth introduction to the two different snow maps offered: the European Alps map or the Global map.

DeFROST API

Do you want to power a custom, more advanced use case? DeFROST API lets you query snow data for a point, along a path or over an area programmatically. Check below for a quick example on a query to find out whether or not there is snow at the top of the Matterhorn:

snow-point

GET https://api.defrost.io/v1/snow-point/{lat}/{lng}

Obtain the latest snow status data for a specific coordinate expressed in latitude and longitude degrees.

Path Parameters

Name	Type	Description
lat	number	Latitude measured in degrees
lng	number	Longitude measured in degrees

200 In this example, DeFROST returns a snow-positive reply for the Matterhorn summit last sensed by a satellite on 19th August 2019 at 12:15 UTC.

{
    "lat": 45.9766,
    "lng": 7.6585, 
    "snow": true,
    "depth": 1,
    "date": "2019-08-19T12:15:00Z",
}

The DeFROST API is a RESTful API compliant with the OpenAPI 2.0 standard, so it can be integrated easily in your application. As such you can use it in any environment connected to the world wide web using a TCP/IP library of your choice. The response data format is in the JSON format, which is widely supported by all major programming languages and frameworks. That means you can integrate the API in most platforms including all major web browsers, Android, iOS, Python, C/C++, Node.js. You name it.

To get started in minutes with either DeFROST Maps or API, read the Development Quickstart.