Receipts, not vibes
Every night, our forecast for the next day is archived before the weather happens — then graded against verified snowfall the morning after. We can't retro-edit it, and we publish the misses next to the wins. No other snow forecaster shows you this.
The forecasts that mattered — including the ones we got wrong.
A big system hit Victoria, but Buller's elevation sat near the freezing line. Our freezing-level handling read it as sleet; the resort's own patrol report settled it the next morning.
A real NZ dump that our model blend averaged down — the single strongest input had it right at 40cm and we pulled it toward quieter models. Logged, and it feeds how we weight models next. Publishing the misses is the whole point of this page.
All three issued the morning of Jul 14 for the same mid-mountain elevations. The storm largely fizzled — Treble Cone got about 5cm, Cardrona barely half a centimetre. Both competitors over-called it hard (Snow-Forecast worst, at 36cm and 17cm); our restrained numbers were closest on both mountains. The whole point of the freezing-level blend is not chasing storms that don't land.
One-day-ahead forecast vs verified actual, most recent first.
| Night | Resorts scored | Avg error* | Biggest event |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-09-12 | 32 | — | quiet everywhere (correctly called) |
| 2026-09-11 | 69 | — | quiet everywhere (correctly called) |
| 2026-09-10 | 69 | 2.8cm | Roundhill — forecast 16.2cm, got 22.3cm |
| 2026-09-09 | 69 | 1.4cm | Treble Cone — forecast 9.1cm, got 12.4cm |
| 2026-09-08 | 69 | — | quiet everywhere (correctly called) |
| 2026-09-07 | 69 | 3.5cm | Tūroa — forecast 2.7cm, got 7.1cm |
| 2026-09-06 | 69 | 10.0cm | Roundhill — forecast 16.6cm, got 37.1cm |
| 2026-09-05 | 69 | 1.9cm | Treble Cone — forecast 6.7cm, got 10.1cm |
| 2026-09-04 | 69 | 3.9cm | Treble Cone — forecast 12.4cm, got 23.1cm |
| 2026-09-03 | 69 | 3.3cm | quiet everywhere (correctly called) |
| 2026-09-02 | 69 | 2.3cm | Ōhau — forecast 0.7cm, got 1.5cm |
| 2026-09-01 | 69 | 3.0cm | Tūroa — forecast 6cm, got 8.8cm |
| 2026-08-31 | 83 | 1.1cm | The Remarkables — forecast 8.7cm, got 9.7cm |
| 2026-08-30 | 55 | 1.7cm | Sunshine Village — forecast 0.1cm, got 5.5cm |
*Mean absolute error on “signal” rows — nights and resorts where either the forecast or the actual was ≥2cm. Quiet days everyone gets right are excluded so the number stays honest.
Every verified double-digit day since we started keeping score, and what we said the night before.
| Date | Resort | We said | It got | Error |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-09-10 | Mt Dobson | 13.6cm | 11.3cm | +2.3cm |
| 2026-09-10 | Roundhill | 16.2cm | 22.3cm | -6.1cm |
| 2026-09-10 | Ōhau | 12.5cm | 13.9cm | -1.4cm |
| 2026-09-10 | Mt Hutt | 10cm | 12.2cm | -2.2cm |
| 2026-09-10 | Treble Cone | 14.7cm | 11cm | +3.7cm |
| 2026-09-10 | Cardrona | 14.1cm | 13.1cm | +1cm |
| 2026-09-09 | Treble Cone | 9.1cm | 12.4cm | -3.3cm |
| 2026-09-06 | Mt Dobson | 11.8cm | 25.1cm | -13.3cm |
| 2026-09-06 | Roundhill | 16.6cm | 37.1cm | -20.5cm |
| 2026-09-06 | Ōhau | 11.7cm | 16.4cm | -4.7cm |
| 2026-09-06 | Mt Hutt | 11.9cm | 23.7cm | -11.8cm |
| 2026-09-06 | Treble Cone | 6.1cm | 10.4cm | -4.3cm |
| 2026-09-05 | Treble Cone | 6.7cm | 10.1cm | -3.4cm |
| 2026-09-04 | Roundhill | 6.7cm | 12.8cm | -6.1cm |
| 2026-09-04 | Ōhau | 6.4cm | 11.1cm | -4.7cm |
| 2026-09-04 | Treble Cone | 12.4cm | 23.1cm | -10.7cm |
| 2026-08-27 | Mt Dobson | 21.3cm | 23.7cm | -2.4cm |
| 2026-08-27 | Roundhill | 24.6cm | 39.7cm | -15.1cm |
| 2026-08-27 | Ōhau | 27.2cm | 37cm | -9.8cm |
| 2026-08-27 | Mt Hutt | 19.6cm | 27.1cm | -7.5cm |
Forecasts blend four global weather models — ECMWF, GFS, ICON and JMA — with a temperature-based snow-to-liquid correction, so cold dry powder isn't under-counted the way fixed-ratio forecasts do. “Verified actual” is the weather model's own next-day analysis of what fell, corrected the same way, and cross-checked against official resort snow reports where resorts publish them. It's an honest yardstick, not a marketing one: mountains with good stake data sometimes record more than the analysis shows. Scoring runs nightly and this page rebuilds automatically — last updated 2026-09-12.
See today's forecasts — 69 resorts