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PG News| Snow tip game 2016/17

Who has the best powder smell?

by PowderGuide 10/25/2016
The amount of fresh snow (in clever terms "24-hour snowfall") is omnipresent in winter: ski resorts use it to attract visitors, it is always too low for real ski bums, the municipal snow clearing service hates it and we even have our own oracle to predict it. Of course, in times after the Reformation, you can't believe everything, you have to be allowed to question!

The oracle Ullrs is keeping an eye on things this winter season and we want to compare the accuracy of the forecasts with our tips in a snow depth competition. For every PowderAlert (ok, let's say almost every one), the 24-hour snowfall total at an observer station in the core zone of the forecast is tipped. At the end of the season, the winner is the one who has the least deviation from the measured values.

What exactly the core zone is and at which station and in which period is tipped, Ullr, or in the sense of this game his helpers Anselm (announcer) and Lars (oracle), define anew for each PowderAlert. For each tip, there is a link to a forum thread under the PowderAlert, where the station, the link to it and the period for the 24-hour tip appear. You must then submit your tip in the corresponding forum thread within the tip period.

At the end of the season, the five best tips from each player will be evaluated. So it doesn't matter if you miss a few tips during the season (we hope for many PowderAlerts, of course). The absolute deviation (amount predicted minus measured value) of these five predictions will be normalized to the actual amount of fresh snow, added together and divided by five. In other words, the winner is the one with the smallest value at the end. There are tempting prizes from our partners and hopefully a good portion of glory powder straight from Ullr's lap.

Another note on the new snow data: We only use data from publicly available observer and meteo stations at ski-relevant altitudes (no valley locations < 1000m). These are sometimes not exactly in the center of the core zone, have station-specific deviations from the regional new snow totals (topographical effects such as congestion or shading) and sometimes offer very different data quality. The highest data quality is provided by observer stations, where the amount of fresh snow is measured by one person at around 8 o'clock in the morning. Automatic weather stations cannot accurately determine the amount of new snow, as settling also plays a role in every snowfall (digression: the snow-water equivalent or density parameter, which is important for hydrologists, cannot be determined automatically at all.)

The Swiss IMIS stations try to mitigate this limitation by modeling with the Snowpack snowpack model. However, we will simply work with the difference in snow depth over the 24-hour period. If this can only be determined graphically (e.g. LAWIS of the Austrian warning services), Ullr's assistants will decide as the highest authority with a keen eye.

This article has been automatically translated by DeepL with subsequent editing. If you notice any spelling or grammatical errors or if the translation has lost its meaning, please write an e-mail to the editors.

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