About
The Cold Smoke Report covers snowfall forecasts for skiers and boarders in southwest Montana including Bridger Bowl and Big Sky with forecast discussions during the season and interesting weather tidbits year-round.
I'm a hurricane scientist who fell in love with snow and skiing during grad school out in Utah, and it's been one of my obsessions ever since. I've been interested in the weather since I was a little kid glued to The Weather Channel, and this blog is my attempt to further scratch that same itch and hopefully give back a little bit of my passion to the community.
My goal is to not only provide forecasts but also include some insight into how forecasts for these complex mountains come together. I'm hoping that you learn a little something and I do too along the way. Snowfall forecasting is inexact, and at least for me, the fun is in trying to reduce the uncertainty rather than pretending it doesn't exist.
Every forecast discussion on this site is written and interpreted by a human, me. Full disclosure, though: I use large dataset, and therefore, a bit of machine learning to try some different forecasting techniques and find new patterns. However, the words and the reasoning are still my own (I guess minus that fact that everything I've learned is an accumulation from interactions with professors and colleagues over the years).
The Season Tracker plots season-to-date snowfall compared to the full station record, and Climatology shows what normal and abnormal seasons look like here. If you ever have any questions or recommendations, feel free to reach out in the Comments at the bottom of each post.
Everything on this site is an experimental research product, not official guidance. Please consult the National Weather Service for weather forecasts, and in the backcountry, the Gallatin National Forest Avalanche Center.