How weekend.ski forecasts and ranks ski resorts
weekend.ski ranks Alpine ski resorts for the coming weekend using Open-Meteo snow forecasts at mid-mountain, door-to-door travel time from your city, and lift pass price. Here is exactly how.
Data source
Weather forecasts come from Open-Meteo, which picks the best available national and global weather models for each location and produces a 14-day daily forecast. Data is refreshed every 3 hours, in line with how often the underlying weather models publish new runs.
weekend.ski tracks 105 ski resorts in France, Switzerland, Italy and Austria. Resort facts (altitude, slope length, lifts, day pass price) are compiled from official resort websites and Skiresort.info.
Where on the mountain
Each forecast is requested at mid-mountain: 60% of the way from the resort's base altitude to its peak. Village-level forecasts underestimate snow; summit forecasts overestimate what most skiers actually ski on.
Weather model grid cells often sit well below the pistes, so a model can show rain where the slopes get snow. We therefore also estimate snowfall from precipitation and the mid-mountain temperature, and use whichever figure is higher.
What "weekend snow" means
Weekend snowfall is the forecast total from Friday to Sunday (Central European Time). Friday counts because snow that falls on Friday is the powder you ski on Saturday.
Snow depth is a modelled value from Open-Meteo, not a measurement reported by the resort. Treat it as an indication, and check the resort's own report for official base depths and open runs.
How resorts are ranked for you
On the homepage, resorts are ranked for your departure city with four weighted factors: travel (40% by default), snow (30%), sun (20%) and value (10%). You can change the weights or pick a preset, and the list re-ranks instantly.
Travel is the real routed drive time by road from the city centre, computed with OSRM. We do not estimate train or flight times. A resort with no routed time gets a neutral travel score.
Snow combines forecast weekend snowfall (the largest part) and base depth, and is reduced when lifts are likely to be on wind hold. Sun is forecast sunshine hours from Friday to Sunday. Value is the adult day-pass price.
If you take the vibe quiz, a soft 15% share of the score comes from how well a resort's character matches your answers. Resorts whose lifts are not running that weekend are listed separately and never ranked.
The Alps snow report is simpler: it ranks every resort purely by forecast weekend snowfall, with no personal factors.
What we never do
If live forecast data for a resort is unavailable, public pages and the API say so. They never show estimated or placeholder numbers.
No resort pays to be listed or ranked.
Using our data
The forecast is available as JSON at /api/public/forecast and as markdown at /snow-report.md. AI assistants, journalists and developers are welcome to use it. Please cite weekend.ski and link the page you used.