Thredbo snow report
Australia's biggest vertical at 672 m2,205 ft and its highest lifted point, and the top of it is often shut: on a mid-season August day in 2026 all five upper lifts sat on wind hold while nine lower ones ran. The snow gums lower down are the compensation. Spencers Creek, read weekly since the 1950s, has lost about a tenth of its snow this century.
Australia · Southern Hemisphere · live from the weather model at 1365–2037 m4478–6683 ft
Imperial when your device is on a US time zone, metric otherwise, until you choose.
Conditions right now
Read at summit elevation the moment you opened this page.
Hourly windows, accumulation ranges, confidence and travel flags, or the transparent 0–100 Ski Meter score.
Weather data by Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0), adapted for display. Elevations are approximate published figures; forecasts are model estimates, not guarantees.
The mountain right now
The live freezing level drawn on the elevation profile. Above the snow line, precipitation falls and stays as snow.
Terrain shape is schematic; elevations are the resort's approximate published figures.
Ten seasons of snow at Thredbo
Daily snow depth at this destination's model grid cell, read as ten complete seasons to 31 August 2026. Natural snow only.
In none of the ten seasons did the depth at this cell reach 30 cm12 in and hold it for a fortnight. The curve below is what the model did record. This is natural snow only: it says nothing about the snow this resort makes, and nothing about terrain higher than the cell.
The band spans the shallowest and the deepest of the ten seasons on each day, and the line runs through the median. It reaches 31 cm12 in, the deepest single day in the record. The dashed line is the 30 cm12 in threshold, and the shaded column is the week Thredbo traditionally opens, 1 to 7 June.
The index asks a different question of the same ten seasons: in the week this mountain traditionally opens, had 30 cm12 in arrived? All 53 destinations are scored side by side, on one rule.
How the start date is found. For each season this takes the longest unbroken run of days at 30 cm (12 in) or more, and counts it only when that run lasted at least 14 days, because a week of early snow that melts out is not a season starting.
What the model cell is. The reanalysis gives this destination one grid square of roughly 9 km5.6 mi and one elevation for it, being the average of all the terrain inside it. Here that is 2001 m6565 ft, against a resort base of 1365 m4478 ft and a summit of 2037 m6683 ft. Compare the cell against those two before you read any number here as a verdict on the mountain. A reanalysis is a model, not a measurement: it can be too smooth over complex terrain, and it can miss a local storm.
Natural snow only. The model knows about weather. It does not know about snow cannons, and no snowmaking is modelled anywhere. The opening week is traditional, not contractual: it is the window this mountain has historically opened in, not a promise. Daily values run to 31 August 2026.
Take the data. Both tables are free to use and free to republish under CC BY 4.0: one row per destination, and one row per destination per season. Both are in centimetres and metres, whichever units this page shows.
Why it snows here
Snow comes from cold fronts and cut-off lows in the Southern Ocean westerlies, and whether they reach New South Wales depends largely on the Southern Annular Mode. The problem here is temperature rather than moisture: at neighbouring Perisher, of 301 mm12 in of precipitation between 1 June and 2 July 2026, only 25 mm1 in fell below freezing. Roughly 92% of it arrived as rain.
Reading Thredbo like a forecaster
The number that matters most at Thredbo is the difference between the base (1365 m4478 ft) and the summit (2037 m6683 ft): when the freezing level sits between the two, the mountain is split into rain or wet snow below and dry snow above. The Ski Meter reads the model at both elevations and scores the day with every point accounted for; the full report adds hourly timing, accumulation ranges and confidence tags so you can decide when to travel, not just whether.