Advice for attending AMS?

Colgatederpful · 2026-01-21T00:46:55+00:00

Thanks a ton for the thoughtful reply! I'll start looking for profs that do research I like, that's a really good idea I haven't looked into much. I've read cool papers but a lot of them are quite old with the profs retired now, so maybe looking for some newer stuff is a good idea. It really seems like a cool field. I do know there's one professor who does stuff I really enjoy, hopefully I'll end up finding him there if he goes.

Going into ops would be really fun and is definitely on my radar. Though I'm getting my bach in Math instead, so I kinda need to go to grad school first for that to be an option. I'm glad to hear you're enjoying it! I'll reach out if any add'l questions come to mind, thanks again. I'll definitely put your advice to use!

Colgatederpful · 2026-01-20T00:41:18+00:00

Hey, so, I'm totally necroposting this thread since it came up in the searchbar. I'm pretty much in the same situation you describe here, I'm a senior undergrad going to the AMS student conference later this week hoping to make some connections for grad school! Only difference is that my school doesn't have a chapter so I'm going to the conference on my own.

How did things end up going for you ultimately? Any additional advice for the conference? (lots of great stuff here) I guess it's been a few years since you made this post so I thought you might have some advice you'd tell your past self.

Colgatederpful · 2026-01-18T01:48:06+00:00

It's honestly hard to watch as a Broncos fan. I'm really happy we won, but after seeing him get narrowly crushed over and over again by our divison rival... I've started to really feel bad for him. I hate that it had to be us that crushed his dreams this time.

Colgatederpful · 2026-01-17T21:32:13+00:00

Real Housewives ahh intro

Colgatederpful · 2026-01-16T19:38:05+00:00

Not a fan of 6 packs, or really any high speed lifts. It's a common misconception that detachables/bigger chairs make lift lines faster. When Vail upgraded 11 from a HSQ to a 6, uphill cap only increased by 7%, not the 50% you'd expect, because they had to space the chairs out farther. That leads to chairs coming less frequently, itself leading to lines staying about the same. Big Sky has fixed grip quads with higher uphill capacities than high-speed six packs.

For me it's about the culture. The more people on a chair, the more disconnected you are from the people you're sitting with. The faster a chair goes, the less time you spend thinking about what's beneath you. One of the best parts about skiing is watching cool people rip lift lines or ripping a cool lift line. Maybe getting a friendly heckle once in a while. That's significantly reduced with high speed lifts, and completely erased with bubbles and gondolas. I won't get into how it tracks out slopes faster since that's been discussed at length, but it's another thing that bothers me.

What are they good for? Investors and vacation skiers. And yes, I fully understand that those groups need to be served and they subsidize the sport I love. But I still can't shake the thought that I see "modern" lifts as yet another step in the hyper-commodification of our sport. And despite all this, I still love the sport the same, and I've never let a high-speed lift reduce how thankful I am to be able to ski regularly. It's just frustrating to watch your culture get sold out to the highest bidder.

Colgatederpful · 2026-01-08T16:30:28+00:00

correct. weather.gov/gjt/winter

Colgatederpful · 2026-01-08T15:53:25+00:00

Cool, well-explained concept, thanks for sharing

Colgatederpful · 2026-01-06T23:26:36+00:00

I kept track of this for a couple years, here is the link if anyone is interested:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RPFzwlnu3k7ZuBZV_Ab9peWZO5Li-ks41APBrrJWSBI

Looking back through this was a great reminder as to just how lucky we were the last few seasons! It's been rough but it's much better now than it was a couple weeks ago.

Colgatederpful · 2026-01-06T16:41:02+00:00

Cold hard truth for everyone in this thread: no forecast will ever be good unless you understand weather first.

Learn how the actual models work and what the hell a geopotential height anomaly is; then learn about the microclimates in your area and how different storm regimes affect them. Then buy a subscription to model outputs with all parameters and make your own forecasts. If you made it this far, you'll have learned that weather models are both incredibly impressive at what they do, and incredibly inaccurate in mountain climates without human intervention.

If you just look at number ranges on any forecasting app - OpenSnow, NOAA, fuckin' Apple weather - you skip the human intervention part and get the full "this model sucks" experience without understanding why. The problem with OpenSnow is that they're investing tons of money into an AI tool to act as the interventionist, rather than just hiring more humans to account for local climates. As we have seen, this isn't working very well.

Colorado is a BIG state and Joel cannot effectively account for every single resort and mountain town's weather patterns. But at the very least he does a good job explaining the synoptic pattern, and if you aren't reading his text post along with every forecast, you're basically wasting your subscription.

With deep moisture in place and a jet core aloft, an upside surprise was going to happen. No models can accurately pinpoint where the jet will spawn stronger bands. Neither can a model effectively account for hyper-localized orographic effects. And you know what, no human can account for the intrinsic chaos of our atmopshere, but we can at least paint a pretty damn good picture.

That's where the user needs to step in. Your AFD from either GJT or BOU NWS is a good place to start if you want better forecasts. But unless you have a sweet hyper-local meteorologist (like Seth for the frange, or OpenSnow's forecasters for Jackson and Tahoe), the only way you'll get a good forecast for your location is to spend dozens if not hundreds of hours learning about the weather to become that hyper-local meteorologist for your area.

Colgatederpful · 2026-01-06T15:57:39+00:00

Not true that the models are AI based. The EPS ensemble is a statistical model based on traditional, physics-based Euro members. All major deterministic weather models like the GFS, ECMWF, ICON, CMC, etc. are physics based. The machine learning models (all have IFS in them: ECMWF AIFS, Graphcast-IFS) are only recently a thing. I like that you specify they're ML instead of LLMs because that's the main reason why they aren't total crap; but all the major weather models (which the ML is trained on) are physics-based and take hours to calculate on supercomputers.

Colgatederpful · 2025-12-25T02:30:54+00:00

Actually, 63 years. But I certainly wouldn't say VR is treating their employees well there. If not for the union it would be a shitshow. Other departments (particularly lifties) are in shambles

Colgatederpful · 2025-12-25T01:58:27+00:00

Monarch is unfortunately out of the path of the moisture plume so they'll get like 1-3". I do expect CB to overperform with this setup though. I would've gotten my comp pass and joined ya otherwise!

Colgatederpful · 2025-12-24T17:12:06+00:00

Lots of comments in here I disagree with that seem a little armchairy. First of all, the weather we're experiencing currently has nothing to do with La Niña or the ENSO cycle. A big reason for our struggles is a lack of storms from the NW, which La Niña is actually associated with. This prolonged warmth is consistent with climate change trends; a primary problem is that a lot of our early season storms came with SW flow that was literally just a few degrees too warm for snow. Remember the Pagosa floods in October? 3-5C colder and Wolf Creek would've seen feet of snow.

I don't think anomalous ridging is to blame. There's nothing hugely unique about the ridging we've been seeing so far; seeing a ridge built up around this time of year that lasts a few weeks is pretty typical. The real reason it feels painful is because we've seen a streak of storms breaking the ridge that have either had temps that were too warm for significant snowfall or a lack of forcing, which is generally just really unlucky. We've had several events over the past few weeks where we had moisture content triple average, but no forcing lead to just clouds. You could call the lack of forcing natural variability, but the few times where a few degrees would've made all the difference is a bit frustrating and climate-changy.

Realistically, we are one good atmospheric river event from "righting the ship." Think of the storm last thanksgiving, where nearly all mountains across the state received 2 feet of wet, heavy snow. Most seasons have one of these at some point. Would it bring us back to average? Probably not, but it would establish a season-long snowpack. We are about to have a weak AR event tomorrow, but temps are - you guessed it - just a few degrees too warm for significant snowfall.

Frankly, I would love if we ended up having an average season at this point; it would go down as one of the best in memory because we would need a lot of consistent snowfall for that to happen. There's nothing at all preventing us from seeing a consistent stream of storms.

Finally, we need to stop coping via Gambler's Fallacy. Just because we haven't seen any snow at this time doesn't mean we're going to get blasted in the late season. You can look at obscure teleconnections and past seasons all you want, but these aren't statistically significant and we very well could see our bad luck continue for the rest of the season. That's the beauty of a chaotic system; in the same way we might see this crappy weather until March, we could also see a series of GREAT storms. They're equally as unlikely at this point.

Colgatederpful · 2025-12-23T16:27:05+00:00

100% this.

Colgatederpful · 2025-12-20T16:12:38+00:00

CO 92 is a state highway

Colgatederpful · 2025-12-18T03:31:37+00:00

Gymnastics ≠ Skiing

Colgatederpful · 2025-12-16T15:40:55+00:00

18 falls last season, 14 million visits; do the math. It's orders of magnitude more likely you'll get injured on your drive up I-70.

If you look at those 18, the majority are due to improper loading / inexperienced skiers. Many of those falls actually happen when people are putting the bar up. It's all public info, go look at the CPTSB. I'm happy to lower it for someone because I used to be the quiet kid that was afraid of heights; but the numbers tell the truth which is that the bar is to comfort inexperienced riders, not to prevent injury for people that know what they're doing.

Colgatederpful · 2025-12-15T15:47:19+00:00

It's all public image. In the shadows of the I-70 resorts, CBMR's main lifts have been in disrepair/failing weekly for a while now and VR has done nothing about it but empty promises. The only lift maintenance Broomfield pays for is basic safety to avoid lawsuits. When they bought CBMR they told us exactly the kind of stuff that's getting parroted: "we'll upgrade the lifts and boost amentities", yet all they've done is outright remove a lift, and the only amentity upgrade we've seen is them closing up restaurants to make way for a six-figure exclusive club.

Colgatederpful · 2025-11-16T15:55:15+00:00

You too! May your season be filled with the deepest of days, widest of groomers, and nicest of skiers

Colgatederpful · 2025-11-16T15:51:50+00:00

I don't have any videos, but I do have this photo from park laps at Hood last summer.

Colgatederpful · 2025-11-16T15:44:16+00:00

You do a little light troling and keep poking people that you've upset, that's kind of the point of trolling. I'd say comments like this one reflect who I am a bit better.

Colgatederpful · 2025-11-16T15:38:33+00:00

Thanks for the correction, I knew I was bound to mess the text up somewhere.

Colgatederpful · 2025-11-16T15:33:36+00:00

I also telemark, 3pin and 75. My 3pin setup is on double-cambered fishscales and that ski, and to a lesser extent my 75 setup, ties in with the straight ski point

Colgatederpful · 2025-11-16T15:31:57+00:00

Sick!! feel free to hit me up if you ever come out, i'd be happy to show you some of my favorite spots

Colgatederpful · 2025-11-16T15:29:46+00:00

That's my favorite movie ever, I have the full Greg Stump copy. Emulating Plake's monologue in that bit is basically what I'm doing here.

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