How to Read a Snow Report (and What Resorts Leave Out)

A snow report is a resort telling you about its own product. The numbers are usually real — resorts do measure them, and a resort caught fabricating them loses more than it gains — but which numbers get published, where they are measured and how they are described is a marketing decision.

Here is what each field means, and how to read the gap between what it says and what you will ski.

The numbers, one at a time

New snow / 24 hours

Snow that fell in the last 24 hours, measured at a fixed stake. The most useful single number on the page, and the hardest to fudge because everyone on the mountain can see whether it is true.

Base depth

The settled snow on the ground. Often given as a range from base to summit, or as an average. Frequently measured at a favourable spot and almost always includes machine-made snow.

Settled / packed base

Base depth after compaction. A metre of fresh snow becomes perhaps 30–40 cm of settled base within a week, which is why base depth grows far more slowly than seasonal snowfall suggests.

Season total

Cumulative snowfall since opening. Impressive, and only loosely related to current conditions — a resort with six metres of season total in April may be skiing on very little of it.

Lifts open / trails open

The number that actually determines your day. Read it as a fraction, not a count: 12 of 14 is a good day, 12 of 40 is not.

Surface conditions

The editorial field. This is where the language does the work — see below.

What the surface words actually mean

The five things a snow report will not tell you

1. Where the snow is. A resort reports one new-snow figure for a mountain that may have 1,000 metres of vertical. The top can have 30 cm while the base has rain.
2. Wind. The single biggest determinant of whether the good lifts run, and it is almost never on the headline report. Check the mountain weather forecast separately.
3. When it was groomed. A run groomed at 4 a.m. skis differently from one groomed at 9 p.m. the night before. The grooming report, where published, is more useful than the surface field.
4. How many people are there. A 20 cm day on a Tuesday and a 20 cm day on a Saturday are completely different products.
5. Whether the snow is natural or made. Machine-made snow is denser, firmer and lasts longer. It skis fine; it just does not ski like the same depth of natural snow.

How to read it the night before

A practical sequence that takes about three minutes:

• Start with lifts and trails open as a fraction. That sets the ceiling on the day.
• Read 24-hour and 48-hour new snow together. Two 10 cm days in a row ski much better than one 20 cm day, because the first covers the old surface and the second stays soft.
• Check the freezing level, not the temperature. The freezing level tells you whether the base is getting rain while the summit gets snow.
• Check wind speed and direction at summit height. Sustained winds above about 60 km/h close exposed lifts.
• Look at the webcams. Thirty seconds of a base-area camera beats any amount of prose, and every resort has them.

Base depth, and why it is the least useful number

Base depth answers a question that almost nobody has. It tells you whether the resort can stay open, which matters enormously to the resort and very little to you on a given Tuesday. A 200 cm base with no new snow in twelve days is firm, tracked and dull. A 60 cm base two days after a storm is excellent.

Where base depth does matter is early and late season. In November it tells you whether there is enough cover to ski off-piste without damaging your skis. In April it tells you how many weeks are left.

Why reports have to be fresh to be worth anything

Snow conditions have a short half-life. A report that is 36 hours old is not a slightly worse report; it is a description of a different mountain. That is why the useful ones carry a timestamp and why a resort that leaves yesterday's numbers up is telling you something about how it is run.

It is also why snowmaking and grooming schedules are among the most consequential decisions a resort makes — a night of grooming can turn a poor surface into a good one across an entire mountain, and it happens between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m. while nobody is watching. If you want to see how that decision plays out, it is one of the levers in our ski resort management game.

Where to check

The resort's own report is the primary source and usually the most current. Cross-check against a mountain weather service for wind and freezing level, and against a snow-aggregator for a second opinion on new snowfall. When the resort and the aggregator disagree by more than about 5 cm, the aggregator is usually reporting a different elevation, not lying.

And remember that the report tells you nothing about crowds. For that, the useful signals are the day of the week, the school calendar and whether the storm made the news — the mechanics of which are in how ski resorts make money.