Elite Forecasters Help Powderhounds Chase Snow
- By Joe Lindsey
- March 29, 2011 |
- 4:00 pm |
- Categories: Science, Weather
For most people, weather forecasts are in the background. We want to know what the drive to work is going to be like, or whether it?ll rain this weekend. For others, weather is vitally important, like farmers who rely on detailed forecasts to know when to plant and harvest crops,
But some use weather specifically to forecast fun. Surfers have long used a network of websites like Surfline.com to tell them when weather and swells combine for the best waves.
Now, skiers and snowboarders have increasingly been able to get in the game with an array of tools to help them decide not just where to go skiing, but when, thanks to a small but growing group of niche weather forecasters offering custom reports tailored to winter sports enthusiasts.
That?s never more important than at the end of the season, when moist, increasingly warm air is colliding with arctic cold fronts, producing some of the largest and most spectacular powder days of the season, like the week-long series of storms that dumped 82 inches of powder (almost seven feet) on Tahoe?s Heavenly over a recent six-day stretch. If you know, you know where to go.
Joel Gratz started Colorado Powder Forecast in 2008 as an e-mail list. Once it grew to over 500 subscribers, he put it online. Just over a year ago, he quit his job to run coloradopowderforecast.com full-time and, for this season, he?s seen over 100,000 unique users visit his site ?on no advertising,? he told Wired.com. (He does use social media, with a presence on both Facebook and Twitter.)
Gratz, who has a meteorology degree from Penn State University, says that the site marries his two passions: weather and skiing. (He?s logged about 70 days on snow this year, he estimates.) And in weather forecasts for skiers, he saw an unserved niche that not only required a more sophisticated understanding of weather, but a greater use for more specific information.
?Weather and snow have been my passions since I was a kid,? Gratz said. ?Skiing is a captive audience. There are these very small windows of perfect weather — in our case, a big dump of powder. Skiers are highly weather sensitive. Even if they can?t rearrange their schedule around when snow falls, they want to know what will happen so they know where they can find the best snow.?
The granddaddy of powder forecasters is Snowforecast.com. Founder Chris Manly started the site in 1998 and now serves most regions in the country with a small posse of equally committed forecasters.
For many, it?s a calling. Gratz built a weather station at age 11. Manly, trained in the military, was reading atmospheric physics books while everyone else was taking smoke breaks: ?You really have to love what you do to get up early in the morning to put all this together.”
Why do we need powder-specific forecasts? Both men said snowfall can be highly variable, and small differences in topography, like whether a ski area is west-facing (and gets the benefit of orographic lifting, like Steamboat), can have huge impacts on snow totals.
But beyond that, the public face of weather forecasting hasn?t changed much in 40 years. ?There?s a massive gap between what meteorologists know and what they communicate to the general public,? Gratz said. ?There have been some accuracy advances but the communication part of it mostly centers on fancy graphics.?
(To underscore this, one of Gratz?s principal tools is a network of backcountry weather stations called SNOTEL, that date to the 1970s.)
As well, mainstream forecasters are trying to serve such a broad viewership that the size of that audience alone prevents them from offering detailed information to specific groups. That?s where Gratz and Manly step in.
Colorado Powder Forecast breaks down storm totals not just by ski area and day of the week, but also time of day. Did the snow fall during the daytime, and when it?s likely to get tracked in? Or did it fall after the lifts close, which makes for a fresh — and far more desirable — blanket of untracked powder to hit the next morning? An easy-to-read format offers best powder days at each area.
But are niche forecasters any more accurate than the mainstream guys? In one repsect, the answer is intrinsically yes. Instead of merely forecasting a 30-percent chance of precipitation for a huge swath of an area — in which some places might get a dusting and others a foot — Gratz and Manly offer detailed point forecasts that make use of the data they say meteorologists have but don?t tell the public about.
And that their audience is more discerning makes for higher stakes. ?The National Weather Service guys are more life-and-limb,” Manly said. ?We don?t have to worry about that, but we do have to fine-tune snowfall estimations more than they do. They don?t lose viewers if they don?t nail the totals.?
Gratz tracks his accuracy with a Keep Me Honest page, which looks at how closely his forecasts have predicted actual snowfall. So far for this 2010-11 ski season, he?s claimed the most accurate forecast in 11 of Colorado?s 21 major storms this season.
That might not sound stellar but it’s, by his count, much more accurate than the next-best alternative, the National Weather Service, which has been tops in six of the 21 storms.
The Weather Channel? None, so far.
Frontpage thumbnail photo: Flickr/apostolosp, CC
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