Weather maps for winter resorts

It’s winter again in Australia! Queen’s birthday long weekend marks the official start to skiing season. The easiest way to look up weather conditions for winter resorts is to visit aus-emaps.com snowfields weather maps for NSW and Victoria. The maps show locations of those resorts, the latest temperature from the Bureau of Meteorology weather stations as well as contain links to the latest forecast for the regions. Embedded webcams from several resorts allow checking actual snow conditions. The maps are a good starting point for exploration of more detailed information about each of the resorts.

Another website maintaining comprehensive winter weather information- including long range forecasts and snowfall models - is ski.com.au. And skibonk.com, offshoot of a very popular weatherbonk.com has also some relevant information covering Australian snowfields.

This year Perisher Blue resort deployed Google Map also as an interactive virtual tour application. It is simple but quite clever concept of overlying a hardcopy trail map of the resort on Google Map and marking important features with categorised icons, matching “the perspective” of the printed map image. The map also has a number of embedded 360 degree images from selected points on the mountain tops that can be viewed in an interactive manner. It gives a good feel for what to expect when you visit the place. But no matter how clever the computer application is, it will never convey the real “chill and thrill” of being there in person!