Snowy

About Snowy

What is Snowy?

Snowy is a snow conditions and weather platform covering more than 570 ski resorts across the United States and Canada. We aggregate resort-reported conditions, weather forecasts from multiple models, lift status, webcams, and historical snowfall data into a single, fast interface designed to help skiers and snowboarders make informed trip decisions.

Weather Models

Snowy pulls forecast data from three independent weather models, letting you compare projections side by side:

  • GFS — The Global Forecast System, run by NOAA. Provides 16-day forecasts at approximately 13 km resolution globally. Best for medium-range planning.
  • ECMWF — The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts model. Widely regarded as the most accurate medium-range model, with 15-day forecasts at approximately 9 km resolution.
  • HRRR — The High-Resolution Rapid Refresh model, run by NOAA. Covers the contiguous US at 3 km resolution with 48-hour forecasts updated hourly. Best for short-range, high-confidence predictions.

Snow Depth Pipeline

Snow depth readings go through a three-tier fallback chain to ensure every resort page displays a value when possible:

  1. Resort-Reported — Daily conditions published by resorts, including summit and base snow depths, new snowfall, terrain percentage open, and lift counts.
  2. SNOTEL — When a resort doesn't report snow depth, we pull the latest snow water equivalent reading from the nearest SNOTEL station (maintained by the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service) and convert it to an estimated snow depth.
  3. Weather Model Estimate — As a final fallback, we use weather model output to estimate snow depth at the resort's coordinates. This is the least precise source, but ensures a value is always available.

Every snow depth reading on Snowy is labeled with its source so you know the provenance of the data you're seeing.

Resort Conditions

Resort conditions — including open/closed status, terrain percentage, lift counts, operating hours, and snow depths — are sourced from resort-published data and live APIs. These provide the baseline data shown in resort headers and stat grids.

Data Freshness

  • Resort conditions: Updated daily
  • Weather forecasts: Cached for one hour, with HRRR updated more frequently during active weather
  • Snowfall charts: Historical data from Historical archive; forecast data refreshed hourly
  • Lift status: Pulled on demand from Liftie.info
  • Webcams: Sourced from Windy.com

Premium Features

Snowy offers a Premium tier ($24.00/year) that unlocks additional features including real-time lift status, multi-model snowfall forecast charts, season snowfall comparisons, resort webcams, and hourly weather forecasts. All core resort data — conditions, snow depths, daily forecasts, and the interactive map — remains free for all users.

Important Notice

All data on Snowy is provided for informational purposes only. Mountain conditions change rapidly — always verify with the resort and local authorities before traveling. Please read our full disclaimer for details.