Yes, the 1700 for tomorrow, 1600 for Wednesday and 1700 for Thursday seem to me to be at odds with the nature of the event. Maybe they have some guidance not available to us mere mortals. Their Wednesday Alpine Area forecast has an inbuilt inconsistency: "Partly cloudy. Areas of rain, easing to isolated showers during the morning, then clearing later in the evening. Rain and showers falling as snow." However, their snow forecasts are roughly consistent with their temp forecasts for Tuesday to Thursday which are for Perisher -3/1, -1/3 and -1/3 and for Thredbo Top Station -3/-1, -1/0 and -2/2. I'll be interested to see how these figures stack up against reality.

There is another added layer of problems with this, that we no longer know what reality is with Top station. I basically now just completely ignore anything that station reads.

If they have -3 to 1 for Tuesday for Perisher then that is already wrong as its going to be at least +2 to +3 most of the night.

Round one( first rain/sleet/snow band) approaching Mt buller and Mt hotham at 11pm
Lucky its coming through at night
Mt Hotham minus 0.3 ( altitude 1849m)
Mt buller 0.7 ( altitude 1700m)
http://www.bom.gov.au/vic/observations/vicall.shtml
http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDR301.loop.shtml

Better than rain anyway

webcam?

Peter, Perisher and Thredbo Top Station are close enough that you can apply a lapse rate test to check air temperature - obviously won't help with other parameters. So in conditions with reasonable wind so as to guard against night-time inversions or day-time local heating, add 1C/100m altitude difference in unsaturated air and 0.5C/100m in saturated air (i.e. at or close to 100% humidity). Thredbo TS is 227m above Perisher, so should be a bit over 2C colder if you assume unsaturated air and about 1C colder if you assume saturated air at all levels between the two stations - obviously a mix of saturation would give figures in between. Although actual lapse rates don't always follow these guidelines precisely, they give a good basis for ruling Thredbo's observations in, out or questionable. Just looking at the last 6 hours, they seem pretty reasonable to me - at present.

A peak of 3.7 at Perisher already after 6am, about what I would have expected.
The difficulty in estimating the reading for Top station is having to rely on Perisher which itself gets funny peaks in the morning due to its sheltered position. Might have to use these a bit more..

http://www.perisher.com.au/weather-cams/weather-stations/current-conditions.html

Do they have a website that gives a bit of history as well?.

I was wondering if the very salty-sea easterly had made it as far as the snowfields, but that perisher weather obs thingy doesn't help much. The tops of the chairs are NW/SW, bottoms are NE (suspect the air in the valley is swirling around), and their 24-hour trends thingy gives everything except wind direction.

easterlies are bad news for the ski fields, rots the snow to hell.

The same site has a 24-hour graph history for the top and bottom quad stations [here]. It currently shows a nice inversion about 7pm last night, with calm at the lower station and 18km/h at the top station, and a 6C difference between the two. Yesterday afternoon, Quad top was showing zero while it was +6 at Quad bottom, again showing the problems of sheltering.

It's hard to over-estimated the difficulty in establishing representative weather stations in alpine areas due to topography, high daytime solar values, and rapid night-time outward radiation in valley locations, among other things. In the meantime, we have to make do with what we've got and currently the Bureau and the 4 Perisher stations are all pretty much in agreement when you take altitude and lapse rate into account, and the fact that there is a reasonable wind at all locations and that it's overcast. I haven't been able to find a photo of the BoM Perisher AWS to see how sheltered it is, but from its lat/long and a highscale map it is WSW of the Ski Tube station, NNW of Warrugang on the northern side of the creek in a SE facing position. It's sheltered in that it's not far from the creek, but then again that applies to most of Perisher.

ant, currently Thredbo Top Stn AWS gives a northerly, which looks right from the isobars, while Perisher gives a NNE to NEly which is probably a product of the SW/NE alignment of the valley it's in.

web cam snap from Mt Hotham this morning 11am
Raining as expected .
Hotham AWS reading minus 0.3
I would imagine the weather station is nowhere near this web cam shot.
Temps not minus anything here
http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDV60801/IDV60801.94906.shtml

going by the archive images from the same cam, it is in village central so close to 1750m. The weather station is on the summit about 1km NW at 1849m. Being so close to zero, the 100m could mean the difference between sleety rain and snow.

Raining at the NSW fields too, ski school have their raincoats on friday flat. It's actually pretty cold here, 9.8c according to the official thing, and darn chilly. Looking at the forecast, it's warmer tomorrow so I'm wondering if the warm air is coming in with the system.

Rain set in here about an hour or so ago, and it's quickly intensifying, mountains blotted out, low cloud level.

25mm of rain from 9.00am to 4.00pm so far..Ouch
for mount Mt buller
By the looks of the radar.. More to come
Temp at 4.00 pm at 1.6 deg c at 1700m
wind gust around 89km/hr atm has been as high as 104km/hr
Wind mostly northerly/ NE

Blinding rain.. Not blinding blizzard

The center of the low ( wrap around) is close to warracknabeal in the west of VIC atm.

Looks like fresh, wetish snow on front valley at Perisher.

http://www.perisher.com.au/weather-cams/cams.html?snowcam=Xfront&run=current

Thredbo claiming 5cm of snow overnight (up top I assume) on Facebook. Wait til daybreak and then see how bad it is on the cams?

http://www.aerology.com/?location=Australia
Daily Forecast maps for the next two years, you can check the past two months May and June for the accuracy if you like. I do this as a public service, have spent ~$15,000.00 of my own money to bring this to you, let me know how well it works.

My workmate has come back from Perisher after 1 week and he said this season has been one of the worse in 15 years.

He said it does snow a lot but the snow doesnt actually settles during the day time because the sun would come out and melt the snow.

Its always hard to be clear on longer term outcomes for the season but the charts are starting to show a discouraging trend. Hopefully late July and August brings a burst of strong, unstable systems.

Raining across the ski fields in July...bummer.

If nothing much changes over the next few weeks then I will declare not just winter 2012 over, but all future winters in Australia as well until the end of the world (as we know it) in about 300 yeas.

Weird, the high country is behaving like a La Nina (warm, wet), meanwhile down in Canberra it feels like a really bitter (and quite dry) winter.

ROFL
I'm currently at Thredbo and I can tell you there's still plenty of snow despite the heavy rain over the past 24 hrs.

Was up the hill today and from the Cruiser runs upwards it was snowing with plenty of extra snow added to the cover from the mid to upper levels of the mountain. Given Spencer Creek where the snow depth is measured sits at about 1830m I would confidently predict this event added at least 20cm to the snow depth.

Looking forward to some good skiing up on the mountain tomorrow. (Today was a little unpleasantly purely due to strong winds).

Winter over? Hardly. Keep posting such stuff though. Despite not a single peice of evidence supporting you, its at least good for entertainment value anyway.

Good to hear that its looking okay down there, Locke. That's the main thing. Some potential next week for a stronger front, at this stage, which could produce a nice top up with colder temps. Would be nice to see an average or better than average season down there for once.

Central Spur doesn't look great this morning:


http://ski.com.au/snowcams/australia/nsw/thredbo/thredbo1.html

Its been very benign beyond the ski fields thus far, not the weakest winter start I've ever seen but not far off it. I do feel that we will see a good front or two in July up this way and into August. How good? We'll see.