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Foster Falls Hillshare from Digital Elevation Model

Foster Falls Hillshade from Digital Elevation Model

Rockfall Hazard Analysis Platform

Talus aims to mitigate one of the top causes of death / injury in outdoor rock climbing (rockfall) by providing climbers with concrete rockfall risk scores for their local wall. This is done via an end-to-end pipeline from raw DEM ingestion to route risk visualization. Freeze-thaw risk windows combined with GPU-identified source zones above a route create actionable information for mitigating rockfall hazards.

Tech Stack

Layer Technology
Microservices Go (5 services)
GPU kernels CUDA
Database PostgreSQL + PostGIS
Containerization Docker, Docker Compose
Frontend Leaflet.js, vanilla JS
CI GitHub Actions
DEM source USGS 3DEP 1/3 arc-second (~10m/cell)
Weather Open-Meteo API

GPU Benchmark

Kernels run on a GTX 1060 3GB against the Foster Falls, TN. CPU baseline is single-threaded sequential execution of the same computation.

Kernel GPU CPU Speedup Cells
Sobel slope/aspect 569ms 6,041ms 10.6× 116.9M
Plan/profile curvature 565ms 1,180ms 2.1× 116.9M
Terrain Ruggedness Index 318ms 1,633ms 5.1× 116.9M

What It Does

  1. Ingests a USGS 3DEP GeoTIFF DEM and USGS NGMDB geology polygons for a climbing area
  2. Runs GPU-accelerated terrain analysis to identify rockfall source
  3. Fetches NOAA HRRR temperature forecasts and computes freeze-thaw risk windows
  4. Scores route risk using a proximity-based formula
  5. Fires webhook alerts when risk exceeds a configured threshold
  6. Displays results on a Leaflet.js map dashboard with source zone overlay, route overlay, freeze-thaw timeline, and GPU benchmark table

Architecture

Four Go microservices communicating via REST, one standalone CUDA terrain binary invoked as a subprocess, and a shared PostgreSQL + PostGIS database.

USGS 3DEP ──► S1 Ingestion (Go) ──► S2 Terrain Preprocessing (Go)
                                              │
                                       CUDA Binary (C/CUDA)
                                       Sobel · Curvature · TRI
                                              │
NOAA NOMADS ──► S4 Hazard Analysis (Go) ◄────┘
                        │
                        ▼
               S5 API Gateway (Go) ──► Browser / Mobile Client
                        │
               PostgreSQL + PostGIS

Services

Service Language Responsibility
S1 — Ingestion Go GeoTIFF parse, GPX ingest, geology ingest
S2 — Terrain Go + CUDA subprocess GPU terrain derivatives, source zone detection
S4 — Hazard Go Proximity risk scoring, freeze-thaw compute, webhook alerts
S5 — Gateway Go + Leaflet.js REST API, static dashboard
PostgreSQL + PostGIS SQL Shared persistent store, spatial queries

Prerequisites

  • Docker and Docker Compose
  • Go 1.25+
  • CUDA 12.2 toolkit

Setup

git clone https://github.com/ethan-howes/talus
cd talus
cp .env.example .env
# fill in POSTGRES_PASSWORD and CUDA_TERRAIN_BINARY_PATH
docker compose -f deployments/docker-compose.yml --env-file .env up --build

Data Sources

Dataset Source Use
3DEP DEM (1/3 arc-second) USGS National Map Primary terrain input
National Geologic Map USGS NGMDB Rock type and simulation parameters
HRRR Forecasts NOAA NOMADS Freeze-thaw temperature forecasts
GPX Routes Personal / AllTrails Route geometries for risk intersection