Questions a snow forecast should answer about itself
A forecast you can't interrogate is just weather-flavoured marketing. Here is exactly how this instrument works, including its limits.
Imperial when your device is on a US time zone, metric otherwise, until you choose.
How accurate is a snow forecast, really?
Reliable to about 24–48 hours, useful to 72 hours, indicative beyond. Snow is the hardest common forecast because a fraction of a degree decides whether precipitation arrives as rain, sleet or powder, which is why we refuse to print a bare number without a confidence tag next to it.
What do the confidence tags mean?
They translate the model's precipitation probability for the hours in question:
- High: at least 70% of model guidance produces precipitation. Plan on it.
- Medium: 40–69%. Pack for it, don't promise it.
- Low: under 40%. A possibility worth watching, not a plan.
Why is accumulation a range like 4–9 cm1.6–3.5 in instead of one number?
The upper figure is the raw model estimate: what falls if every forecast hour delivers. The lower figure weights each hour by its own probability. Reality usually lands in between. A single number would be false precision, and false precision is how forecasts lose your trust.
Why does elevation matter so much?
Air cools roughly 0.6 °C per 100 m3.3 °F per 1,000 ft you climb. Every report shows the freezing level: the altitude where rain becomes snow. A valley at 800 m2,625 ft can get cold rain while the slopes 1,200 m3,937 ft above it collect half a metre20 in. This is also why the Ski Meter reads the model twice per resort: once at the base, once at the summit.
Where does the data come from?
Everything comes from Open-Meteo, an open-data weather API combining national models (ICON from the German weather service, GFS from US NOAA, IFS from ECMWF and others), licensed CC BY 4.0. Location search uses Open-Meteo's geocoder. SnowReport has no server of its own: your browser talks directly to the weather API, and this site is plain static files.
How fresh is what I'm seeing?
The underlying models refresh every 1–6 hours depending on region. SnowReport fetches live each time you check, caches results in your browser for 15 minutes, and stamps every report with when it was read. If the weather service is down, you get the last good copy clearly labelled "stale", never silently.
Is it really snowing when you say "snowing now"?
"Snowing now" means the model's current-conditions analysis, a blend of observations, radar and model physics, reports falling snow at that grid point. It's the best answer available without a human standing there. On marginal days near 0 °C32 °F, read it as "precipitation very likely, form uncertain".
Do you track me? Cookies? Ads?
No cookies, no accounts, no trackers. Watchlist, recent searches and units live in your browser's localStorage and never leave your device. "Use my location" sends coordinates only to the weather API to fetch your forecast; there is no SnowReport server that could store them. The full detail is in the privacy note.
Can I get snow alerts?
There are no accounts and no push servers here, by design. The closest thing is the watchlist: star your places on the report page, and each visit shows what changed since you last checked. Add the site to your home screen; the answer is always two taps away.
Ski Meter vs the resort's own snow report: which should I trust?
Use both, for what each is good at. The resort knows its lifts, grooming and measured base, and it's also marketing. The Ski Meter knows none of that, but it reads the same model for all 53 resorts with identical rules and shows every point of the score. One instrument has local knowledge and a motive; the other has neither.