Now that many of you have downloaded the new 3D trail map for your favorite mountain (Crystal, of course!), it’s time to take your insider-info up a notch.
Forrest found his bluebird day on Exterminator Ridge
Gone are the days when you have to go to the NWAC site to decipher the telemetry data for Crystal. Now you can see exactly what’s going on here in real-time. Thanks to former patroller, budding forecaster and all-together genius Chris Morin, we now have an easy to use, read and obsess over weather data site.
Below is a screenshot from crystalweather.com taken 12/23/2015. The upper left green square shows the new snow since 9am that morning. The square on the right shows the new snow from the previous 24 hours. The blue squares are temps at three locations on the mountain. The color of these squares turns red when we are above freezing. The black squares are our snow totals on the ground. Notice here that we hit 100″ in Green Valley. The snowpack has since settled to 79″, but the temps have remained cold.
But there’s more!
Below is a screenshot from the Combined Tables found in the main menu of the site during the same time period. This is in 5 minute intervals, but you can view in 1 minute intervals up to yearly intervals. To see more, just continue to scroll down and the data appears for as long as we have digitized records.
Notice the wind in the gray column. The first number is average winds, the next is gusts (denoted with a G) and the last is the wind direction. The numbers on the right are the SWE (snow water equivalent) aka precipitation during that interval, denoted P, and also the accumulated, denoted PA.
Now when you want (need) to check the current weather at Crystal, it’s literally at your fingertips. The simple design works well in both mobile and desktop. As an added bonus the home screen also shows the four webcams at Crystal. I especially like to obsessively check the snow stake cam at the bottom of Chair 6. Even though that stake is out in the open, and can be aggressively effected by wind, it’s nice to watch the snow pile up.
Just saying.
