If you are a downhill skier and like to visit some of the bigger mountains to our northeast and east, you have to check out this new forecast website here. The National Weather Service (NWS) in Burlington, Vermont, has a webpage devoted to forecasts for 19 mountains in New York and Vermont. The page has been in testing since September 2009 and has been a “hit” (pun intended). According to the NWS, the recreational mountain forecasts ranks in their top 15 most visited on their site. Starting November 5th, 2010, the website will go fully operational. Not that you can’t visit it now, it’s just following the NWS protocol for developing and introducing new products.
Most weather forecasts you see on the web or television newscasts are made for where people live. Not many people live up in the high elevations of New York and Vermont so they go largely without a specific forecast. And the weather can be dramatically different up there compared to lower elevations. Temperatures are usually, but not always, cooler and winds stronger.
So weather you are a downhill skier, mountain climber, or just one of the few who live or work on one of these mountains, take a look at these high elevation forecasts. I’ve included a couple of screen grab images from the NWS website. One of them shows a map of the different mountains in New York and Vermont that are forecasted. And another which shows a sample of what the forecasts look like and contain.