Disclaimer

Montana Snow Report is published by Montana Property Reports, LLC, Livingston, Montana. It gathers public data and explains it. It is not an official warning, forecast, road report or avalanche forecast, and it is not affiliated with, endorsed by or produced by the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, NOAA or the National Weather Service, the Montana Department of Transportation, the U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. Forest Service or any avalanche center.

Safety decisions

Rely on the National Weather Service for weather warnings, the issuing avalanche center for avalanche danger, and Montana 511 for road conditions and closures. No road is safe because a figure here reads low, and no slope is safe because a zone here reads a certain color. Alerts, where offered, repeat published figures; a missed, delayed or garbled message is not a basis for a safety decision.

What the figures are

Every figure on the site carries one of five labels: observed (an instrument measured it), modeled (a named model produced it), forecast (the National Weather Service issued it), median (the 1991-2020 statistic for the date) or derived (we computed it from the others and say how). Nothing missing is filled in with an assumed value; when a source fails or publishes nothing for a place, the figure reads unavailable and says why. The rules behind every derived figure, including the winter travel impact score, are written down on the How the numbers are made page and in the site's methodology.

Limits of the data

Snow is measured at 99 automated stations, almost all in the western and central mountains; a station's reading is not the snow at your house. Basin figures follow the NRCS method and are held back when the medians are too small to compare. Forecasts are for a grid cell about 2.5 km across, whose elevation can differ from a pass summit by hundreds of feet. Road-weather readings come from a sensor at one point on the road. Modeled snow is a model. Avalanche ratings are the centers' and are shown as issued, with the problems and discussion left to the center's own page.

Your use

Use the site and its alerts as one input among several, and check the official source before acting. Montana Property Reports, LLC accepts no liability for decisions made on the strength of a figure here beyond what the terms of sale state for paid products, and nothing here limits rights that cannot be waived under Montana law.

Questions: matt@paradisevalleymedia.com.