How to Use Freshsnow.jp and F.A.Q.

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Table of Contents – How to use Freshsnow.jp and F.A.Q.

How does freshsnow.jp measure the distances between ski resorts in the block, “Ski Resorts Near [resort-name] Ski Area” on individual ski resort pages?

When viewing individual ski resorts, you will often come across a block on the page entitled, “Ski Resorts Near [resort-name] Ski Area”. If you have registered and are logged in, you will see a complete list of resorts within a certain number of km of the resort your are viewing. If you have not logged in, you will only see a maximum of 3 resorts (you might see no resorts if there is nothing nearby in our database). We first calculate the latitude and longitude of the centroid of each ski resort that the user is viewing. We then get the respective coordinates of the center of all other ski resorts in our database throughout Japan. We use the haversine formula to calculate the straightline distance in meters, kilometers, etc. Therefore, the distance between any two ski resorts is the straight line distance and not the driving distance between the resorts which can be quite different (we plan to add driving distances for registered users in the future). Nevertheless, it does give you a very good idea of the number of resorts in the area. The list presented is always in increasing distance from the resort you are viewing.

What additional benefits are there to registering with freshsnow.jp?

Firstly, our website is free! There is no charge. There are certain areas of the website that are not viewable unless you register and log in. For instance, to see the distance of many of the ski resorts around the resort you are viewing, you will need to register and login. For example, if you view the individual page from Ookuradake Kogen Ski Area, you will only see a maximum of 3 ski resorts and their associated straight line distance to other resorts. If you log in, you will see a sorted list of the 10 closest resorts is ascending order of distance from the resort you are viewing within 50 km. Links are readily available to those resorts. While you may decide to hit one of Japan’s large resorts (won’t name and names here), more often than not, you will find that the total skiable terrain when you add up all the other resorts around a smaller resort is bigger than any one large resort.

How is maximum elevation and minimum elevation of each ski resort calculated?

Each resort is represented by a polygon delineating the resort’s approximate area. Digital Elevation Model (D.E.M.) data is obtained from Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). Essentially, we overlay the resort’s polygon on top of JAXA’s D.E.M. data and run geospatial calculations to obtain the maximum elevation and minimum elevation of the resort. It therefore can differ from any resort’s self reported max and min elevation, however, we feel we do a pretty good job of automatically calculating it ourselves for over 300 resorts!

How Does Japan Rate Ski Run Difficutly?

We have written a full article about it here.