Weather S01E07: Will there be snow? Planning for your next North American Ski holiday.

North America is not quite experiencing El Nino yet, but meteorologists are using the term “El Ninoesk” to infer we are getting close, with many expecting to announce an official El Nino cycle for North America around the New Year.

But close enough that it might influence your planned ski vacation more than you had hoped.

These days we can get forecasts that forecasters only dreamt about merely a decade ago.

This discussion will focus on how you can find these forecasts, and make use of them.

The first charts just contain data plotted for the USA, but most of Canada's significant ski areas are located close enough to the border that you can infer what may be affecting them. For example, I have found that by imagining a corridor that extends off the top of Idaho and NW Montana I get a pretty good picture of what we are experiencing in the Southern Canadian Rockies.

The ECMWF charts however, do include global forecasts for all over the globe. Those can be found at the 16:00 mark in the timeline.

Timeline:
00:00 A real time look at the snow in the Canadian Rockies on Nov. 20, 2023
00:15 How to find the first chart (IEM for continental USA)
01:00 Which parameters to select to generate the plot of interest
07:55 Using the Integrated Water Portal Chart
13:05 Using the US Drought Monitor charts
16:00 Using the ECMWF forecast charts, 4 are relevant to forecasting future precipitation anomalies.
24:45 How to get an overview of the locations of the major North American ski areas, and some of the downfalls of using Google Maps and other popular ski review websites in terms of inaccuracies and omissions

Links:
M Data Plotter (Areas that have experienced drought until now:)
IEM Data Plotter (chart #24)
https://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/plo...

Integrated Water Portal Chart:
https://legacy.climate.ncsu.edu/water...

U.S. Drought Monitor
https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/

ECMWF Charts
https://charts.ecmwf.int/