Snow on the Go

Snow lovers are information addicts. The advent of the Internet has allowed us to cut through the marketing guff and make our own decisions on what the conditions are like and what to expect.

Ian Dunlop & Richard Tribe, owners of ski.com.au pioneered Australian Snow Cams in the mid/late 1990’s, around the same time Pete ‘The Frog’ Taylor began using experimental long range weather forecasting models to predict snowfalls, first on the ski.com.au forums and now on his own Snowatch site. The Bureau of Meteorology has live reporting weather stations (AWS) from all the major resorts and their Alpine Forecasts have improved vastly in content and accuracy over the last few years. Moutainwatch have also upped the ante with their panning, zooming live streaming cams and Weatherzone is also a particularly comprehensive source of weather information.

None of this is particularly new, however the recent advent of 3G Networks and Smartphones such as Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android platform has meant that this information is all available on the go and in your pocket. Even aussieskier.com has a site formatted for mobile devices.

Smartphones have also revolutionised user-generated contribution to many of these sites. My weekend updates, including photos, will be coming from my iPhone and iPad, forum members have been posting about conditions from their Smartphones and communicating via Twitter and Facebook. Usually the first signal to me that it is snowing is the cavalcade of Facebook status updates from friends on the hill.

So I thought I would list a few of the mobile enabled websites, and phone applications that I find particularly useful to keep up with things while out and about:

Mobile Sites:
ski.com.au Mobile offers Snow Cams, Snow Reports, Weather, News and many other of the site’s main features formatted for mobile devices.
Snowatch Mobile – this will automatically redirect if you enter http://snowatch.com.au into a mobile device
Bureau of Meteorology – BOM is not smartphone specific, but generally pages are low on fluff so will load quickly and not blow your data quota.

Facebook and Twitter are also very useful ways to access information as both official and unofficial Snow Reports are communicated this way.

Some iPhone Apps:
Quiksilver Snow is a free version of the Mountainwatch app with branding.
Mt Buller have their own iPhone App with Lift Status, Snow Cams and Trail Maps (but strangely no snow reports)
Weatherzone app is very useful for Weather Observations, Maps, Radar, Satellite & Synoptic Images
Pocket Weather presents BOM Weather forecasts and data in a concise and visually appealing format

As I only have access to an iPhone/iPad I’d love to hear what’s out there for the other platforms such as Symbian and Android, also please let me know what websites, mobile and otherwise, that you use to make decisions regarding the snow.

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