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These weather resources are my favorites for forecasting mountain weather as it relates to climbing and skiing.
Short-term weather forecasts
Short-term weather forecasts
These are my go-to tools when I'm looking at weather within a 5-day span, where I feel the forecasts are truly beginning to gain some accuracy.
Weather.gov provides quick and easy forecasts accessed via a click-map or search bar function. You can easily compare forecast areas at different elevations to understand how weather may be different at passess, valleys, or summits.
Use this tool to check on the weather forecasts generally, it's easy to bookmark specific pages you'll check often, and read through them briefly.
The elevation of the forecast area is highlighted beneath the map, this is an important variable.
Meteoblue is an excellent weather forecasting tool, I find it great for three main reasons.
Easy to digest top-line graphical descriptions of the weather forecast.
Confidence intervals in the weather forecast. These are huge for me, the site lists "predicability" as a variable, which can give you more or less confidence in the weather forecasts you're seeing.
the MultiModel, a tool that lays out 12 different weather-models side by side so you can easily visualize their differences.
The "targets" on the bottom of the image display confidence in the forecast, here we a score of 3/4
Windy serves a lot of purposes. I'll lean into the details with windy when I'm trying to figure out where clouds will actually be. Will my ski tour be in a whiteout? or will it just by a gray-bird day with high clouds? The "meteogram" often has my answer.
The gray lines indicate cloud density and elevation. Elevation switches to units pilots use, I just google "FL300" or, "FL100" when needed.
Storm chasing
Storm chasing
My go-to tools when I'm looking to chase powder skiing.
This site gives easily digestible info, along with professional forecasters assessment of storms. Easy to ready, fun to check.
This site is also fun for the powder-chasing skier. Along the lefthand side you'll see a forecast created for most of major ski areas of the United States. Once you find yours (Mammoth is linked above), you can then click "current" and view a line graph of likely snow depths. It's nice to see if all forecasts are in agreement, or if you've only been paying attention to the one tool that's an outlier.
These snowfall accumulation maps display forecasted maximum snowfalls, minimum, and average. They're pretty and fun to check!
This is the same information as any weather.gov forecast, but if you set your parameters correctly you can highlight when there may be more than 2" of snow in a 6hr period, for example.
Long-term weather forecasts
Long-term weather forecasts
These are fun tools that forego accuracy for looking about as far ahead as makes sense with weather forecasting.
This site will let you choose your region, and then see a longterm model run of the GFS forecast. It's a nice way to visual where storms are tracking, and watch things change as the forecasted weather moves in closer.
Here a small storm tracks over the southwestern US.
Live weather data
Live weather data
What's actually going on out there
This is my favorite tool to understand current temperatures, live snowfall rates, and winds in the mountains.
Questions? Please let me know, miles@mountainism.com
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