Where to Ski And Snowboard -

Snow report sites

12th October 2009, by Chris Gill

Yummy powder

The most useful snow and weather sites

A bewildering range of websites now carry snow report data. Here is our attempt to isolate the most valuable. But if you use them, have a care. Some complex automatic systems are involved in shifting all this data around the net, and in the process some strange things happen. If a particular figure stands out as remarkable, it’s probably just wrong. The more complex the site, the more often wrong figures seem to surface. It’s not unusual for one site to publish snow depths for a given resort that are twice the depths you see on another site. Have fun!

National summary sites

Austria

http://www.austria.info/uk  Buried deep inside the national tourism website is a rather cluttered but comprehensive set of pages with snow reports from everywhere you could think of.
 
http://www.tiscover.com/:  More versatile, though containing essentially the same data.  A feature we particularly like is the section on conditions on all the toboggan runs. There’s thorough for you.

http://www.bergfex.com/:  Probably using the same info again, but presenting it in a slightly more easily digested form.

ZAM:  The current weather and forecast info on these sites comes from the national body.

France

www.ski-resort-france.co.uk: It’s tricky to find these days without guidance, but there is still a French national snow report site, quite clearly laid out in sections devoted to the major regions.
http://chamonix-meteo.com: Keen meteo-geeks will find lots of amusement here.

http://france.meteofrance.com/: has some useful stuff including a rain/snow radar map.

We often check the Courchevel snow cover page because it gives such a clear picture of the recent past.

Italy

We haven’t so far found a definitive national Italian site - Italy tends to be organised regionally, to the extent that it is organised at all - but we have found some quite useful sites.

http://www.3bmeteo.com/: has about the best national overview. Scroll down the page to the lists of resorts and click on regional headings to get tabulated snow/lift info.

http://www.eurometeo.com/: An Italian-focused weather site with links to individual parts of the following sites.

http://www.meteomont.net: The national snow and avalanche forecast service, with some detailed info. The snow and avalanche interregional association site has some good information if you burrow into it. Click on Bollettini, and choose your area. What you get varies widely between regions.

The Dolomiti Superski site has a clear table of everything you need. The Trentino tourism marketing site has links to resort sites, but no tables of snow info.
Other sites listed below contain Italian information.

Switzerland

http://snow.myswitzerland.com/: Easily found on this national tourism site is a neat system that allows you to select either a region or the top 30 resorts and then order them in various ways; but we make little use of it, because there are no snow depths and no recent snowfall information.
http://www.slf.ch/english_EN : Snow and Avalanche Research institution. A really interesting site that we consult regularly. It has such things as a map showing recent snow accumulation across the country, and another showing snow depth as a proportion of the long-term average for each place. In Jan 09, for example, this was showing that the normally dry Engadin resorts (St Moritz etc) were doing much better than usual.

The is also good info on Switzerland on the essentially Austrian Bergfex site, too.

Bulgaria

http://www.bulgariaski.com/:  Run by a British-based holiday firm that carries the most comprehensive reports.

North America

Naturally, there are plenty of sites carrying snow data for resorts in the US and Canada. About the best, we reckon, are:

SnoCountry (http://www.snocountry.com/): state-based tables including very recent snowfall data.

SkiReport (http://www.skireport.com/): tabulated accumulations for the past 24 and 72 hours.

OnTheSnow.com (http://www.onthesnow.com/): ditto.

 

 

Other sites

Ski Club of Great Britain (http://www.skiclub.co.uk/skiclub/default.aspx): carries comprehensive daily snow reports, with additional info for members (though that info is famously less than explicit when conditions are poor).

Skiinfo (http://www.skiinfo.com/): a Norwegian-based site with some neat facilities - you can for example see resorts in a given country ordered by recent snowfall, or by accumulated snow. We find some of its data curiously inconsistent, though.

Snow-forecast.com (http://www.snow-forecast.com/): carries the Ski Club of GB snow report overview but is mainly focused on forecasts, some free and some available only to subscribers. Two of the site’s most useful maps are the 7 day snow accumulation map and the 3 day snow forecast map.

WunderMap (http://www.wunderground.com): a recent discovery, which is an interactive gadget capable of showing rain radar.

 

 

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