Feature: Elevation Distribution Histograms

[dfhampshire]

Total vertical drop is a "vanity metric" that doesn't reflect snow reliability or terrain utility. A resort with 2000m of vertical might have 80% of its terrain in a low-altitude "melt zone."

Proposal: Generate a histogram for each resort area to visualize terrain distribution across altitude gradients.

• X-axis: Elevation (meters).
• Y-axis: total edge length of pistes.
• Overlay: Color-code bins by difficulty tags (piste:difficulty).

Data Source: Use existing piste:type ways and elevation data already being pulled from TerrainRGB/SRTM.

I might clone and contribute this feature anyways since I'm interested in seeing the outputs.

[dhimmel]

Great idea. I can't believe I never thought of that! This is exactly the kind of question that OpenSkiStats can answer, likely for the first time publicly in a largescale data driven manner.

I might clone and contribute this feature anyways since I'm interested in seeing the outputs.

Great idea. Pull request appreciated. If possible, maybe start small and see if you can make a function to create this visualization/analysis for a single ski area and we can iterate on the code/design.

[dfhampshire]

I'm currently away skiing (hence finding the repo!), so once I’ve got the local environment dialed in, I’ll dive in. I’ll start with a single-area prototype based on where I am now and we can go from there. We’ll definitely want to play around with the viz to make sure it strikes the right balance.

[dfhampshire]

I've been working on a proof-of-concept implementation for this issue. Here's where things stand:

Full view (4×4, matching rose dimensions)

Preview (1×1, matching rose preview)

Implementation notes

• Segments binned by elevation midpoint
• Median elevation computed as weighted median (50% of total skiable distance above/below)
• 4 tests added in test_elevation.py covering both test ski areas
• No CLI wiring yet — keeping this as a standalone POC

Would you be able to add me as a collaborator so I can push the elevation-histogram-poc branch? Happy to open a PR for review.

[dhimmel]

@dfhampshire can't wait to take a look. You might have to edit the comment and drag and drop the images cause I don't see them.

Would you be able to add me as a collaborator so I can push the elevation-histogram-poc branch? Happy to open a PR for review.

You should be able to make a pull request as is. Let me know if you have any trouble with that.

[dfhampshire]

I Added the screenshots - it seems my browser swallowed them before i hit submit.

I'm still running into issues pushing the branch -
remote: Permission to dhimmel/OpenSkiStats.git denied to dfhampshire. fatal: unable to access 'https://github.com/dhimmel/OpenSkiStats.git/': The requested URL returned error: 403

I get the same in various different ways. I'm pretty sure you need to add me as a collaborator under Settings->Collaborators

[dhimmel]

Nice, these are cool plots. They will get even more interesting if we compare multiple ski resorts in a faceted way, such that you see the comparison on shared axes.

But let's review at the current state to keep things manageable.

If you push your commits to a branch on the https://github.com/dfhampshire/openskistats fork, then you should be able to pull request with your fork branch as the head and dhimmel:main as the head.