Sources and integrity
Every number on this site comes from a published source. Depth is measured on the ground. Weather is modelled. Those two are never mixed up, and this page explains why that distinction decides the whole design.
Both lines claim to be snow depth at the same place. The blue one is read off a stake by Snowy Hydro. The orange one is what a global weather model thinks is there.
ERA5-Land models snow on a grid cell of roughly nine kilometres, and it treats that cell as one flat surface at its average elevation. For the Perisher point that average is 1724 metres, well below the ground the gauge sits on. The model cannot see that Spencers Creek is a high, sheltered site chosen because it holds snow. It smooths the mountains away and behaves like somewhere lower and warmer, so it under-reads the depth badly and melts out weeks too early.
This is not a criticism of the model. Reanalysis is built to describe the atmosphere over large areas, not the snowpack on one hillside. It just means modelled snow depth is unusable here, which is why depth on this site only ever comes from a gauge, and why the temperature, wind and precipitation we do take from the model are treated as indicative rather than exact.
| Spencers Creek depth | Snowy Hydro, 1954 to today, read roughly weekly. Used for Perisher and Thredbo, which have no long public gauge of their own. It sits at about 1830 m between the two. |
| Falls Creek depth | Alpine Resorts Victoria, daily, 1993 to 2023, natural depth only. Licensed CC BY. |
| Mt Hotham depth | Alpine Resorts Victoria, daily, 1993 to 2017, natural depth only. Licensed CC BY. |
| Current base depth | Snowy Hydro for the NSW resorts, and the Falls Creek and Mt Hotham snow reports for the Victorian ones, refreshed several times a day. |
| Weather, past | Open-Meteo ERA5-Land reanalysis, daily, from 1993, downscaled to each resort's elevation. |
| Weather, forecast | Open-Meteo forecast API, 16 days ahead, same variables. |
The Victorian archives change what they measure. Both files carry natural readings and, from 2006, a snow-making average. Mt Hotham stops recording a natural figure after 2017, so its history here ends there rather than mixing two different things into one line. Falls Creek keeps recording natural depth to 2023.
Spencers Creek is not a ski run. It is a catchment measurement site. It is the best long indicator of natural cover in the Snowy Mountains and it is not the depth on any particular trail, especially where snow is made.
Readings are irregular. Snowy Hydro reads on no fixed weekday. Where the daily score needs a depth between readings, it is interpolated, and gaps longer than the site's normal cadence are left empty rather than guessed at.
The current season is partial. It appears in the charts as it happens and should not be compared with completed seasons on totals.
The Victorian data is published by Alpine Resorts Victoria under CC BY and is reproduced here with attribution. Snowy Hydro publishes its readings for operational purposes and we present them in good faith as a historical guide. Open-Meteo data is used under its own terms. If you want to check any figure on this site against its source, every link above goes to the original.