Snow stats: Big Sky in a 33-year low—with time left for a comeback 

With the peak of El Niño likely behind, forecasters share cautious optimism that winter’s ‘meat and potatoes’ lay ahead 

By Jack Reaney ASSOCIATE EDITOR 

Of the 23 years that Chelan Babineau-Z has worked for Big Sky Ski Patrol, this winter is off to the least snowy start on record. As assistant director of snow safety, he helps keep those records.  

Data aside, the dry winter is easy small-talk for anyone wearing short sleeves in the near 50-degree sun of late January 2024.  

Babineau-Z said this is the lowest year-to-date snow of any winter in Big Sky Resort’s 33-year record of reliable data—there may have been two or three comparable winters in the 1970s and ‘80s, but that data then wasn’t robust or consistent enough to compare. The Lone Mountain SNOTEL station—an agriculture-focused snowpack study maintained by the National Resources Conservation Service—agrees: this winter is a significant minimum for the past 30 years, at least.  

ABOVE: This winter’s trend is plotted in black on Lone Mountain’s SNOTEL graph. This online interactive plot includes the aggregate minimum and maximum records—combining the high and low points from various years—since 1991. This winter, denoted as 2024, has been setting a new low since Dec. 16. COURTESY OF NRCS / USDA

As of Jan. 30, Lone Mountain has received about 50% of its average snowfall, year-to-date. Snow water equivalent, the amount of moisture in snow and SNOTEL’s primary metric, is a touch higher at 55%. Babineau-Z said this drought is fairly consistent across Montana and the Mountain West during this El Niño winter—an oceanic climate phenomenon that typically means warmer, drier winter weather across the northwest U.S.  

Right now, the numbers are bleak for snow sports, tourism-based businesses, projected runoff and river health, and, to some extent, summer wildfire danger.  

Still, there’s time on the clock and Babineau-Z is cautiously optimistic. 

“[This] extremely strong historic El Niño pattern looks to be weakening… That will break down some of the weather patterns that have dictated our weather so far this season,” Babineau-Z told EBS in a phone call on Jan. 30. 

Big Sky Resort’s ski season isn’t even halfway over until Feb. 8.  

Despite the “low-tide” snow conditions—impacting the resort’s lower elevations especially—Babineau-Z noted that temperatures and wind conditions have been favorable. All things considered, he’s amazed by skiing conditions off the tram and other high-elevation slopes.  

“The skiing quality, I think, has been much better than the numbers would indicate,” Babineau-Z said. While winds can sometimes prime Big Sky’s finest skiing, “the alpine has not been scoured by as many high-wind events as we normally would have this time of year,” he added.  

Babineau-Z said Big Sky has another ace up its sleeve: one of the lowest standard deviations in annual snowfall of any resort in the West, at 49 inches. That means Big Sky’s annual snowfall will be within 49 inches of average for about two-thirds of its winters. 

“When [winters] start poor—low snowfall—they tend to end better. The El Niño years we have on record tend to make recoveries during the spring months. Our snowfall here always trends towards average,” Babineau-Z said.  

How real is El Niño, anyway? 

Bob Ambrose, Montana and Canadian Rockies forecaster for OpenSnow, writes three statewide forecasts per week for subscribed readers. He’s been doing it out of Whitefish for nine years, and on the phone with EBS on Jan. 30, he said this winter is the least amount of snow statewide he’s seen since first moving to Missoula in 1997. 

The bearer of bad news throughout most of the 2023-24 season, Ambrose tries to sprinkle in some comedy.  

“We’re all kind of frustrated, but there’s not much we can do about it. I do try to occasionally throw in a thing here and there to lighten the mood,” he said. “… It gets tougher and tougher as it continues to get worse and worse.”  

Big Sky has avoided the bouts of rain that impacted Whitefish over the past weekend, and that in December “devastated early season snowpack” in many locations, especially lower elevations and mountains west of the Continental Divide.  

“Big Sky has actually had some surprising storms this season that outperformed what I think you guys would get,” Ambrose recalled. “But a lot of long stretches in between with no snow.” 

It’s looking like a poster El Niño winter in Montana, he said. The ENSO pattern was “extremely strong” in November, December and January.  

“And it tends to wane, although last I had read… The El Niño was going to hang on through March,” Ambrose said.  

As he spoke with EBS, he came across an updated “El Niño Advisory” issued on Jan. 24 by NOAA’s climate prediction center—Ambrose praised NOAA’s supercomputers. 

“It’s looking like we’ll be slightly below average in precipitation, and slightly above average in temperatures. El Nino is expected to continue into the start of April,” Ambrose said, interpreting the report live. “What they’re also saying is we’re going to [progress] into an ENSO-neutral pattern… so El Niño will become more gradually average.”   

April isn’t ideal, but Ambrose added that it may not be worth putting too much stock into El Niño. After all, this January hosted record or near-record low temperatures across Montana. Ambrose said anything can happen—with about a dozen El Niño winters since 1981, the formula doesn’t spell absolute doom. Any forecast beyond 10 days begins to lose accuracy, he said, and despite El Niño’s persistence, mountains east of the Continental Divide—including Big Sky and Bridger Bowl—are better positioned for average precipitation through April anyway.  

“The elevation at Big Sky works in your favor. I would say we’re going into historically very snowy months in March, sort of the meat and potatoes of our winter,” Ambrose said—the reason he typically plans ski trips between late February and mid-March. 

A possible pattern shift

He emphasized that it’s best to take forecasts 10 days at a time.  

“We still have a ways to go, and if we did get another cold push of air from the north, we could make up for this [snowpack deficit]… We have space to make up, and I’m just hoping that we can get some cooler air. And this weekend is looking like it could be a start,” Ambrose said.   

With model runs continuing to build confidence around a snowstorm from Feb. 2-4, Ambrose hopes it will begin a pattern change—the change he’s been writing of in his forecasts, in vain thus far, throughout December and January.  

Matthew Ludwig, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Great Falls, said this weekend’s storm won’t be the saving grace for the winter’s snowpack, but agreed with Ambrose’s hope that it could be a good start.  

“Super beneficial, and that can’t really be understated… This is definitely helping us to maintain our snowpack a little more,” Ludwig said.  

Details remain uncertain, but Ludwig’s model showed strong probability for high-elevation snow accumulating between 4.5 and 11 inches this coming weekend from Friday night through Saturday. On Sunday, another 2.5 inches with upside of 6, depending on the timing of the storm’s arrival.  

In total for high elevations in the Big Sky area, “Friday afternoon through Sunday evening we’re looking at, on the low end, 8 [inches], and on the high end, about 15 inches,” Ludwig said.  

Whether or not those juicy numbers pan out, it’s going to take a long-term pattern shift for the regional snowpack to recover. Bidding farewell to a dry January, there’s plenty of winter left for optimism in Big Sky.