We're always at work refining both our data and our presentation. Barely a day goes past without some progress being made and while we don't tend to announce most of the little things, especially those that aren't immediately perceptible, we do have some more notable upgrades that we have done to our Maps section where our radar lives.

All composite radar in North America is built from publically available data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Meteorological Service of Canada (MSC), however they do not break down precipitation by type and the raw data is sometimes noisy. Our radar is sourced from The Weather Company who also supplies radar to Weather.com and WeatherUnderground, and we know from experience that it is the most accurate when it comes to estimating precipitation types and also for cleaning up artifacts. In elevation storms it tends to be hyper accurate, however in inversion type systems such as the one impacting the Northeast today with warm air overriding the cold it can run a little colder in presentation at times, yet still significantly more accurate than any other product we have reviewed.

When we first launched radar in the beginning of the season we moved our resources to work on weather automation but we have now circled back to better refine our radar and introduce new types of maps. We have now resolved some issues that created some flashing from frame to frame and many other small fixes which makes it significantly smoother in presentation.

We have also added satellite imagery and radar + satellite combined which can be accessed from the top left dropdown menu.

We previously announced that we had added markers and labels for every ski area in the East Coast as well as the depiction of lifts and trails along with terrain, all you have to do is zoom in close enough and these things will appear automatically on the maps. You can also change your viewing angle and see terrain in 3D by holding down the Ctrl key and moving your left mouse button on desktop, or on mobile by using two fingers at a time and moving simultaneously.

And we're not done yet either! Currently Luis is working on optimizing the display more for mobile devices and while our radar is free to the general public, we'll be providing our subscribers with 6 hour radar loops and future radar out to at least 24 hours.

Other Improvements

We are still also working on launching an app for both IOS and Android, and the primary holdups currently are the app store requirements for allowing us to bypass their own payment interfaces which themselves are much more complicated to integrate into an existing subscription system and the app tax is of course astronomical. We'll get there soon enough, but we just have to dot our i's and cross our t's first. Our entire site though is optimized for mobile devices and viewing Snowology through your browser will provide for the same experience in the short-term outside of having a handy icon to click on.

We'll also be working through the entire spring, summer, and fall to further enhance our data and presentation, expanding automated weather coverage to all of Quebec and Ontario, providing for things like favorites and comparison tools, and allowing us to manually tune precipitation on a daily basis all the way down to individual resorts. No one aside from the NWS has this capability presently, but unlike the NWS we can extend this through the entire 7 day window that we cover (beyond which is the fantasy range which is misleading and irresponsible to provide in the East).

It is our desire to not only be the most accurate ski weather resource for the East Coast, but the most accurate we can possibly be while also providing an easy to use interface and features that no one else dare attempt like predicting wind holds and even sticky snow conditions because such things require years of forecasting and verification in order to do properly. We actually consult with owners, GMs, operational directors and managers regularly and our social media followers assist us in crowdsourcing conditions in order to better tune our forecasts.

Tell your friends, heck, tell every stranger you meet on the lifts!

Knowledge Is Powder!

-- Matthew Scott