Bushwalk Australia

Hi all,

How accurate is Mountainwatch.com normally and do any of you use it with a lot of faith when planning your trips?

I've been watching the Falls Creek forecast on the BOM website for the last few days and it has snow showers predicted for the next 3/7 days, with snow down to 1100 m on one day. However, Mountainwatch.com has 0 cm of snow forecast for Falls Creek over this period!

I think I'd have more confidence in a BOM forecast, but would be interested to hear any of your thoughts on this...

Not really sure about the accuracy of mountainwatch looks like a fairly good site for skiers and board riders though. I use mountain-forecast.com and I find it fairly accurate. Well, as accurate as a weather forecast can be.

One would think that BOM has all the data and have the competence in analysis. What capabilities do these private services have that BOM does not apart from fancy web sites?

GPSGuided wrote:One would think that BOM has all the data and have the competence in analysis. What capabilities do these private services have that BOM does not apart from fancy web sites?

I find that the predictions of the BOM are overly cautious and seldom accurate with respect to just how severe, wet or hot
it's going to be in my neighbourhood. The predictions are generally excessive particularly in terms of rainfall and wind strength. I do use both the BOM and mountain forecast to get a good sense of what might happen in the mountains.

Looking at the group, I'm curious how much better they could be than BOM. A group of skiers, snowboarders, financial and marketing types. Do they have their own algorithms for prediction of condition? Don't quite understand it.

There is a really odd weather pattern coming up over the next few days. I have been checking the central area weather and all the sites keep changing their minds about what is going to happen. It depends a lot on how much a low in the Tasman sea blocks a high from moving in from the west. Different sites may be putting slightly different emphasis on certain models or just changing over the space of few hours. The weather will probably settle down after Sunday, but I expect you wanted weekend weather.

The auto generated forecast stuff by mountainwatch (ie the snowfall tallys etc) are always way out. However their resident forecaster the grasshopper is very good. However his forecasts are always written as a blog and nothing to do with the autogenerated stuff (mind you he only does long range stuff this time of year until the season starts). BOM and a bit of knowledge on reading weather maps yourself are always a good way to go. Plus the weather section on ski.com.au forum has some pretty good guys on there. I haven't rechecked the weather today but until yesterday there looked like there was a lovely big ECL due to form. They can often throw copious amounts of rain or snow at the mountains and its often flip of a coin which way it will go (mind you unfortunately rain more often than not)