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WeatherBlog 15 2024/25 | The new PowderGuide weather v2.4.0

When will winter finally do our PG-weather justice?

02/19/2025 by Sebastian Müller
The Friday before last (07/02/2025) we released the new PowderGuide-weather, version 2.4.0, which has been providing you with the weather forecast since then. We no longer only show ICON but also the SNOWGRID and EXOLABS snowpack models. We look back with satisfaction on our old system, but we also had to develop further. The new system covers the whole of Europe and also international regions, includes new variables and extends the forecast to 7.5 days. It was a turbulent development process, and not all ideas were realised. But we are pleased with the result and we are sure that it will also keep you both informed and entertained. The weather forecast, which is usually the main focus of the WeatherBlog, can be found in abridged form in the picture gallery, and anyway and unfortunately there is not much going on in the Alps next week.

The old PowderGuide-ICON-weather, version 1.0.0

Let's take a quick look back. In the summer of 2023, during the redevelopment of the PG website, we decided to make our own weather service. In this system v1.0.0, the 1099 lines long PG_ICON_Wetter_20230801.py, fed with internal functions, dictionaries and colorbars, ran daily on our weather page since the beginning of December 2023. It is embedded in the tileserver, which projects the tiled image files onto the map. This system caused us few problems: we have had a fresh forecast online early in the morning every day since then. This was an incalculable risk at the time, but thanks to the support of our web agency croox, especially Andreas Haas, a meteorologist's dream became a stable reality. Over the course of last winter, two more regions were added, the Pyrenees and Scandinavia. But PG-ICON-Wetter, v1.0.0, is going into its well-deserved retirement. Once again, cheers to this programme! But now to the new system.

The new PowderGuide-weather, version 2.4.0

We have been working on a new system since mid-2024. This should be more flexible and elegant. For example, we could now create forecasts for any time step. Meteograms were to be generated in another programme. Neither of these has yet been realised. The most obvious innovation is that the patchwork of regions (Scandinavia, Pyrenees, ...) has been dissolved and instead the entire ICON-EU area is shown, which extends from Iceland to Afghanistan, and from Norway to North Africa. In addition, we show the global model of ICON, which covers a forecast period of 7 and a half days, both for Europe and for North America, the Andes, Kashmir and Japan. Fears that the calculation of the tiles would take too much time have only partially materialised. After all, we are subject to our requirement that the ICON forecast, which is initialised at 0 a.m. UTC and is available from around 3 a.m. UTC, is displayed from 6 a.m. CET. In the end, we had to split the programme into Europe and worldwide, as remapping the non-European regions takes a lot of time. Then the question arose as to how to deal with the high-resolution Nest ICON-D2, whether we would show it as an independent model and thus leave the user the option of choosing between ICON-EU and ICON-D2, or whether we would integrate ICON-D2 into ICON-EU. We decided in favour of the latter. Technically, this was quite a challenge, but we think it's worth it.

Valuable feedback from our community and our own reflections made us realise that the snow variables snow temperature, snow age and snow density are not very useful, and perhaps even misleading, and we no longer show them at present. These variables are derived from the ICON snowpack model (TERRA-ML) and this is not intended to predict snow depth and powder, it is only concerned with the water and radiation budget. Snow depth is therefore only obtained indirectly in ICON and is derived from snow water content and snow density. Other models are better suited for snow depths, especially in mountainous terrain. In return, we now offer you the variables "relative humidity (2m) [%]", "cloud cover [%]" and "zero degree line [m]", each at midday.

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SNOWGRID und EXOLABS

SNOWGRID, operated by GEOSPHERE, is a high-resolution (1km*1km) snow cover model that calculates snow depths very accurately from exclusive observations. Unfortunately, SNOWGRID only exists for Austria. We finally became aware of EXOLABS, a spin-off from ETH Zurich. EXOLABS uses station data as well as satellite data and generates unrivalled detailed snow depth data using machine learning on high-resolution orography (20m*20m in the Alps, 300m*300m worldwide). It is a very valuable data set of snow depths that is ideal for freeride and ski tour planning.

User Experience Design

The user interface is characterised by various control elements. In desktop mode, there is a bar of variables at the top left, divided into snow and weather variables, and an additional block at the top right (snow depth change, influences, ensemble properties, etc.) and a search bar. At the bottom left is the timeline with the sum sign, which controls the accumulation of precipitation. At the bottom right is the legend and below it the model selection. A probe is available for this purpose: simply click to display the exact value of the location. In addition, you can now share the forecast you have generated via URL, as this contains information about the selected variable as well as the map section and probe. The best UX design is the one you don't notice when using it. Good work has gone into this. Thank you croox, bravo Andi!

Summa summarum

We are convinced that ICON with its ensemble system is currently one of the best weather forecast models. The snow cover models SNOWGRID and especially EXOLABS extend our range with the finest snow depth data. The innovations are summarised below:

  • New regions: North America, Andes, Kashmir, Japan

  • extended forecast period: 7 and a half days

  • new variables: Cloud cover, soil moisture, zero degree line

  • new snow depth models: SNOWGRID for Austria, EXOLABS worldwide

We hope that the winter weather in the Alps will finally do justice to our PG weather v2.4.0 and that winter will get going soon! An introduction to both the new weather system and the current weather situation can be found in the picture gallery.

Photo gallery

ℹ️PowderGuide.com is nonprofit-making, so we are glad about any support. If you like to improve our DeepL translation backend, feel free to write an email to the editors with your suggestions for better understandings. Thanks a lot in advance!

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