Getting Colder again with rumors of Symphony Opening soon

The temperatures are falling, but there is still an inversion in place. At least we are getting back down to the zero mark (in the alpine) and will hopefully go below again soon. The freezing levels are also lowering, and there is even snow in the forecast (nothing substantial though). So it sounds like things are starting to pick up !!

There is even the chance of Symphony opening this weekend (as mentioned by people in the comments from yesterday, and I have heard similar)

I mainly skied Whistler today, with a short trip across the P2P for a single run on 7th, and then one along Ridge Runner in the Crystal zone. I found the snow extremely hard packed everywhere I went, including 7th (I was there around midday). I wasn’t overly impressed with the quality of the grooming on Blackcomb, hence the return to Whistler, where I had found the Dave Murray and Lower Franz runs to be in excellent groomer condition. I felt confident skiing at speed on them, because the slopes were smooth and consistent with no ‘hidden surprises’.

So great skiing on the groomers in the sunshine with great visibility, but horrible skiing off-piste as the snow is rock solid and ‘chunky’.

As for the snow in the forecast (and I see a lot of comments in yesterdays posts about forecast variations) – the only forecast that has any chance of being ‘reliable’ is the alpine forecast from Whistler Blackcomb – which I link to from the right sidebar. It is a 5 day forecast, produced by meteorologists that work for Whistler Blackcomb ( I believe ). As far as I know WB is the only resort that makes public the reports from their weather department. Obviously it is a cut-down version, and departments such as Patrol/Lift Ops/Snowmaking etc get access to much more detail. Still,it is produced by people working on the mountain, for the mountain.
The other forecasts are okay for ‘general’ warming/cooling trends and the chance of precipitation or not, but they rarely seem to get it right for exact numbers. I am guessing most of them are just taking figures broadcast by the Canadian/US governments and working from there. The WB department does its own research, data collection and prediction models (and I presume they use the other data as well).

Anyway, what I am getting around to saying, is that the chance of snow (other than a light dusting) before February is pretty slim. WB are predicting a slight chance of a flurry or two this weekend, and then by looking at the satellite pics (on the web) you can see that anything bigger will be at least a few days to week to later.

I actually have found the source below to be a decent long range forecast (for precipitation amounts anyway, not so much the temps). It is a graph showing the forecast for Vancouver, which is 130klms or so south of us. It is in German and hard to read, but the general idea is this -
The top set of lines is the temperature ( °C – read on the left hand side) at 1500m above sea level (around mid mountain) and the bottom set of lines is the amount of precipitation expected (in mm – read on the right hand side). Within those sets, the easiest thing to do is look for the ‘white’ line which is the average of the other ones.
Because it is for Vancouver, I tend to ignore the temperature lines and focus on the precipitation – which is generally similar for us (although this year they have had a lot more than us). I like to use this link to try and see the upcoming temperatures. (choose temperatures – and ’3000′ in the box that starts out saying ‘SFC’)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 at 6:08 pm and is filed under Snow Reports.