About Where To Ski
Where To Ski ranks every ski resort in the world by how much snow is forecast to fall there. Pick the resort, region or country you care about and the snowiest places come first, with the numbers right there. No ads, no accounts.
Why it exists
On March 6, 2022, we were driving to Winter Park, Colorado, checked the forecast, and saw Steamboat was getting more snow. We changed course and had a great day. Where To Ski makes that check quick for any resort, anywhere.
Where the numbers come from
- Forecasts come from Open-Meteo, using each resort's location and elevation. The whole site is rebuilt once a day; the "Updated" time on each page says when.
- Resorts (location, elevation, runs, lifts, website) come from OpenSkiMap, which is built from OpenStreetMap. Small hills count too. Terrain numbers are only as complete as the map data.
How each number is calculated
- Past 72h
- Snow the forecast model estimates fell over the last three days. It is modeled, not measured at the resort.
- Next 24h, Next 7 days, 16 days
- Forecast snowfall at the summit, added up hour by hour starting from the current hour, so snow that already fell is never counted twice. Rankings use the 7-day total, then the 16-day total.
- Days
- Daily totals and day names use the resort's own calendar day. Hourly times use your time zone, which you can change in Settings.
- Colors
- Blue always means snow, and deeper blue means more: under 1″, 1–2″, 2–6″, 6–12″ and 12″ or more. The number is always shown too. A snow day is 2″ or more in a day; a powder day is 6″ or more.
- Snow or rain?
- For the next three days we compare the freezing level, during the hours it is actually precipitating, with the resort's base and summit. Below the base means snow all the way down; between base and summit means rain at the bottom; above the summit means rain everywhere. Snow usually falls a few hundred meters below the freezing level, so these labels lean cautious. Base temperatures come from a second forecast at the base elevation.
- More snow nearby and Near me
- "More snow nearby" appears when a resort within 150 km (93 mi) has at least twice the 7-day snow and at least 3″ more. "Near me" ranks resorts within 300 km (186 mi) of you. Your location stays in your browser.
- Why there's no snow depth
- Forecast models estimate a snow depth, but it ignores grooming, snowmaking and avalanche control, so it can be far from the real base. Resorts publish their own snow reports; check those for depth.
Credits and license
- Weather data by Open-Meteo.com, licensed CC BY 4.0.
- Resort and map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License, via OpenSkiMap.
- Map tiles by OpenFreeMap and OpenMapTiles.
- The site is open source under the MIT License, built with Ruby and hosted on Cloudflare.