Snow telemetry for winter trip planning

Snow telemetry, or “SNOTEL”, is a system of snowpack data monitoring stations around the western USA. They offer real time snowpack data for a specific location. If you’re planning a trip in the general area at around that same elevation, you can probably expect to see about that same level of snow.

Below are some screenshots from showing how you can get started.

(Note that some of the screenshots are a year or two old, and the current website might look a little different.)

If you want to see snowpack models for the whole Western USA that are made from these data, you can learn about those here.

SnoTel stations in the Western USA (from CalTopo.com > Realtime Data)

From here, you can zoom in on one particular area of interest. For this example, we’ll look at the south side of Mt. Hood Oregon.

Above each small circle, if you squint a bit you can see three numbers. The top is the current snow depth in inches, the middle is the “snow water equivalent” (not of much interest to most backcountry users) and the bottom is the current temperature.

If you click on the red circle, you get a pop up graph of basic data from the previous seven days. If you want to take a deeper dive into the data, click on the “Official Site” link in the graph.

That brings up a page that looks something like this:

From here, you can look at all sorts of tables and graphs of past data. What has the snow depth and temperature variation been over the previous month? Was there a freeze thaw cycle, which might solidify the snow pack? You can view the data in a table or a graph. Choose what flavor of data you want to view, use the “Layout” drop-down to select a chart, use the “Time Period” drop-down to select dates you want to see, such as previous 30 days.

(Some of the charts shown below are from a year or so ago. The website is re-formatted regularly and what you see may not quite look like this.)

Table of recent snow data. See snow depth and air temperature. Can show at a glance if there’s a freeze/thaw cycle.

and a graph. The red line shows exact snow depth at that location.

In Feb 2021, Gaia GPS added a snow telemetry map layer as well, available for premium level membership. They are layer is a bit more user-friendly, because it has some color coding to show whether snow is melting or accumulating. Here's a screen grab of that, with the legend added to the lower left corner.