Where does J2Ski get their reports from?

I got a J2Ski snow report today for Lech and it says that Lech is reporting powder. I looked on the Lech/Zurs website and there is no mention of powder. This conflicting information seems to happen quite a lot.
Indeed, when I was in Lech recently the J2Ski reports were completely at odds with the real conditions. I wrote to J2Ski about this but had no reply. So does anyone know why there is such a conflict and where do J2Ski get their information from because I now no longer rely on their reports?

Firstly; sorry you've not had a reply (presumably you sent us an email?) - we'll check our spam folders and come back to you.

Our forecasts and snow reports come from a variety of sources; unfortunately none of them are perfect but we do try to use the best we can find.

For the majority of the major resorts, we generally take current conditions directly from tourist office sources; usually they are reliable but sometimes base depths turn out to be measured in odd places (like gullies) and some offices "forget" to update their reports when the sun comes out...

Our forecasts originate in one or other of the main global models (e.g. GFS, ECMWF, etc.) and are processed by our supplier for the effects of topography/geography - which works better for some locations than others. There have been some recent changes to the underlying models/processing and we know there are issues currently being addressed.

Regarding Lech, I can see that our current forecast is rather different from the local meteo predictions; so I have fed that back to our provider. We do occasionally find data errors (e.g. the ski area being in the wrong place) and it's possible that's the case here.

We are in the middle of a significant re-vamp of our forecasts, to take advantage of new data recently available, and will be trialling that over the next couple of months.

Thanks for your answer.
Yes I did send an email.
I ski for 12 weeks a season and in many resorts and so snow and weather reports are very important to me. I am sorry to say that I have lost faith in your reports so I hope things will improve greatly after the revamp. Will you be informing your users when this has taken place?

Same happened to me in Solden, J2 said reporting powder every day I was there, and in fact it only snowed once.

It was also badly wrong while I was in St Moritz reporting thick fog every day when we were skiing in glorious sunshine!!!

I use snow-forecast but I double check with meteosuisse and I trust the latter more. So snowflakes on snow-forecast don't excite me unless this forecast is confirmed, otherwise I just ignore it.

Sadly, in the weeks coming up to a trip, I visit multiple forecast sites hoping for the best possible conditions. Sometimes they agree and sometimes they disagree violently :roll:.

However, the reality is that it doesn't really matter to me as I am usually booked onto flights and into accommodation months in advance and I am going regardless of conditions :shock:. Not quite sure why I torture myself like this :oops:.

When in resort, I find the local forecasts for the rest of the day tend to be pretty accurate :wink:

I can tell you that it's snowing hard in Saas-Fee down to village level. Unfortunately visibility at the top is very bad and it's windy so they've shut some lifts early. There's plenty of snow but it's not that cold so lower slopes are slushy. My gluhwein is nice though.

Meteo Suisse is good as it owns the basic data-gathering equipment around Switzerland i.e. it is the source for all other reporting, so it makes sense to use them directly. There are two routes, the website and the app.

The website landing page is at www.meteosuisse.ch and you can go to the top right and put the postcode or name of a location to get a location-specific forecast.

The app is very good. But note that it's called 'Meteoswiss' when you search in the Appstore. I've found that the forecasts and reports are accurate (or as accurate as they are likely to be, given mountain conditions).