Meet Colorado's powdercaster
- Details
- Created on Tuesday, 11 January 2011 07:00
- Written by R. Scott Rappold
By R. SCOTT RAPPOLD
THE GAZETTE
“If you don’t do it this year, you’ll be one year older when you do.” - Warren Miller, legendary ski filmmaker
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Joel Gratz was sick of doom-and-gloom winter weather forecasts.
Dangerous highways, avalanches, traffic jams — these are not what he thinks about when a big storm is heading Colorado’s way.
“We live for snow. We live for storms,” said Gratz, of Boulder, who has degrees in meteorology and environmental studies.
“While most of the other weather outlets talk about snow and winter weather in a dire scenario and bad driving, I was just a little tired of hearing the negative aspects of snow and wanted to communicate the fun we have in snow.”
So he created coloradopowderforecast.com, a weather forecast website — by a skier, for skiers — to report on snowfall and help people plan where and when they will take their weekend ski trips or sudden sick days off work.
A Philadelphia-area native, Gratz moved to Boulder to attend the University of Colorado and graduated in 2006. He worked for an insurance company, analyzing data to determine risk of damage from hurricanes and developing a website for the public to estimate future hurricane damage. The powder forecast, launched in 2008, was a hobby.
But the site has (pardon the pun) snowballed. He said December 2010 saw 230,000 page views on his site, as many as the entire 2009-10 ski season. His name is popping up with greater frequency in the skiing world, as publications and websites consult him on snowfall trends.
Gratz recently quit his day job to focus full-time on what he loves most: snow.
“It’s finally getting to the point that advertisers are starting to take notice,” Gratz said by phone recently, as he drove to Lake Tahoe, Calif., for some skiing and networking.
Of course, there are hundreds of websites with weather forecasts, where you can go to find if there is a 30 percent chance of snow or whether six to 12 inches is expected in a particular region. From television stations to the National Weather Service, they’re all relying on pretty much the same weather data from radar and satellites.
The difference with Gratz’s site, he said, is flair, a reference to the cult film “Office Space.” The site claims Gratz is a “meteorologist with 37 pieces of flair who actually goes out into the snow to test his own predictions.”
His daily forecast lists the best chances for a powder day in the upcoming week, and the likelihood of snow at each resort. The ski areas are grouped by ski pass compatibility — Vail Resorts’ mountains, Intrawest, etc.
He also has a daily discussion of the next big storm or unfortunate dry spell, and he just started video forecasts of himself standing in front of a green screen, gesturing at the jet stream like a local TV weatherman in a parka.
The site has another function you won’t see at the National Weather Service or WeatherBug: a “keep me honest” page.
After each storm, Gratz writes a postmortem of what he got right or wrong in his forecast. When a storm predicted to bring a big helping of snow to Summit County over New Year’s Eve weekend proved to be largely a dud, he ate a bit of crow.
“The southwestern mountains did pretty well but some of the central and northern mountains didn’t do so well,” Gratz said of that storm. “This is the fun part of weather forecasting, when you think you’ve got the storm nailed and you know what it’s going to do and it throws a curve ball at the last minute.”
“The ‘keep me honest’ section is fun for me, because that’s how I learn to do it better.”
Though he has technical help, he is still a “one-man band.” The downside of success is he doesn’t get to ski as much, though he still gets out a few times a week, and, unlike the rest of us, he doesn’t have to take a sick day.
After all, it’s research.
“That’s still the best way for me to get better at what I’m doing, because with any snowstorm, I’ll try to find the most snow.”
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