I’ve added a new link under the Weather tab on the main menu, thanks to Alf Skrastins who sent in this information about Windy.com. The link is for West Bragg Creek, but the map is interactive and you can get the weather forecast for anywhere. It looks intimidating at first, but play around with it and you’ll soon get the hang of it. As of 8:30 a.m., it is forecasting 4 cm of snow for Lake Louise on Sunday night.
Windy.com for West Bragg Creek
Hi Bob,
I noticed your item about the snow forecasts.
Just before the big snow event at the start of October, I wrote down the snowfall amounts that various weather services were predicting for the western Bragg Creek area.
Here’s the list:
Environment Canada- 10 to 20 cm
Weather Network – 15-25 cm
YR.NO (Norwegian) – 22.5 mm water equivalence.
Windy.com – 28 cm
Weather Underground – 32-50cm
Snow-Forecast (Mtn-Forecast) – 55 cm (at Moose Mountain).
Actual snowfall was measured as 62mm water equivalence at Little Elbow Snow Pillow.
I measured 47cm at the WBC Trails Centre and up to 60 cm on some of the trails.
Based on that event, I would declare Mountain-Forecast (same organization as Snow-Forecast) as the winner, with Weather Underground being a close second. The worst guess came from Environment Canada.
It might be worth tracking the performance of the various weather models at different locations.
I like Windy.com because it has great graphics that help me understand where the snow (or rain) is going to fall and how the wind patterns will be pushing the systems. You can use the option bar on the right hand side to select for temperatures, precipitation, snowfall totals, etc. The time-line at the bottom is great for showing the timing of weather systems. They are usually more conservative about precipitation amounts than Snow-Forecast, but much better than Environment Canada or Weather Network.
Here’s the link (for WBC): https://www.windy.com/50.949/-114.717?50.159,-114.725,7,m:e33acXX
