WINTER AND MOUNTAINEERING WEATHER AND CONDITIONS

Hi

With Winter sort of upon us I thought I would share some useful links to help with planning around mountain weather and conditions and route conditions. Many will be aware of these apps, some maybe not. And please feel free to chip in with other top tips or links as relevant. I do always keep an eye on the Met office links but only really as a guide before drilling down into the areas I want to focus on. For that I use the following.

My favourite weather app is the Norwegian service. It gives pretty accurate forecasts broken down to hourly level, in particular as regards temperature, cloud and precipitation. It also goes down to really local level, individual peaks and locations.

https://www.yr.no/en/forecast/daily-table/2-2654065/United%20Kingdom/Scotland/Highland/Cairn%20Gorm

I also like meteoblue for its graphs and charts and actually it seems to give better wind forecasts, plus it meteorological maps give a big picture feel to the prediction.

https://www.meteoblue.com/en/weather/week/aviemore_united-kingdom_11710926

MWIS will be known to most of you and its great for broad regional mountain forecasts. It is only updated twice a day and, like I said, its regional not detailed location. I sometimes think if I followed MWIS advice I would never leave the house.

https://www.mwis.org.uk/forecasts/scottish/cairngorms-np-and-monadhliath

The SAIS are terrific for avalanche avoidance and route planning. Plus, like the old Lake District Fell top assessors, some of the detail is observational and some comes from the cameras; which you can also watch. Like the MWIS it really is area-wide and you have to apply the guidance and their templates yourself to your specific objectives.

https://www.mwis.org.uk/forecasts/avalanche

Finally to get really into specific objective planning there are always the forums on UKC. More recently I followed this link from the MWIS site and it is terrific at giving detailed beta about routes climbed and their conditions, supplemented by the sites own analysis. The free version is OK but the paid version doesn’t cost that much and goes into greater detail.

https://www.winterclimbingforecasts.co.uk/?mwis

Hope you find it all useful and please contribute and comment from your own experiences and ideas.

Cheers JJM

• This topic was modified 2 years, 10 months ago by John.