Elite tools for everyone
Alpine Kinetics is a research and product lab building software and infrastructure to help people and teams understand snow, weather, and avalanche dynamics.
The capability gap
Avalanche forecasting teams depend on operational toolchains — integrated systems that transform raw data into actionable forecasts. The gold standard is Météo-France's SCM: SAFRAN, CROCUS, and MEPRA working seamlessly together.
State-of-the-art capabilities like physical snowpack modeling (SNOWPACK), distributed surface energy balance (Alpine3D), and wind field simulation are only accessible to academics and the most sophisticated avalanche centers in the world. Brilliant open source tools exist, each representing decades of research, but weaving them together into an operational system takes tremendous expertise and effort.
We're democratizing access to these capabilities.
Building for the Future
We are building products for mountain people — intuitive tools that make sophisticated snow, weather, and avalanche technology accessible to everyone. But to build those products, we first needed to solve a fundamental problem: the avalanche forecasting ecosystem is fragmented. Data sources don't talk to each other. World-class models like SNOWPACK and Alpine3D require deep expertise to operationalize. Hazard standards vary by region.
We started with infrastructure. DRIFT, SHEAR, Flow, and Hazard are the connective tissue — open source tools that unify data ingestion, physical modeling, hazard assessment, and forecast generation. They're useful on their own for avalanche centers and researchers, but they exist to enable something bigger: the product experiences we've always wanted to build.
Our Principles
The beliefs that guide everything we build at Alpine Kinetics.
Open Source First
Tools that help protect lives should be freely available. We build open source infrastructure for the avalanche industry.
Rigorous Engineering
We take the time to build things right. This is safety-critical software, not a move-fast-and-break-things startup.
Built on Proven Science
We don't reinvent the wheel. DRIFT builds on decades of peer-reviewed snow science and battle-tested models.
Systems Thinking
We build complete systems, not scattered tools. The true value is in how the pieces work together.
Mike Arpaia
I've spent my career building decision-support systems that combine data, computation, and human expertise to improve high-stakes decisions—from creating osquery at Facebook (now the industry standard for endpoint security) to architecting ML systems at Workday and Moonfire. With Alpine Kinetics, I'm bringing that same approach to snow science and avalanche forecasting.