Thayer, the Wasatch Snow Forecast blogger and OpenSnow founder, said he might have made himself obsolete.
“What made me valuable is I knew all these biases... You know, these models don't pick up snow, and this flow, as well, and so we're probably going to get more than they say,” he said at the Park City Chamber of Commerce's 2025 Fall Tourism Forum Nov. 6. “AI does that a lot better than I do.”
Thayer told attendees artificial intelligence is now better at predicting when and where snow will fall than traditional, “physics-based” models.
“There's all these different models, all with different strengths and different focuses that are based on physics,” Thayer said. “Meaning they take millions of inputs for every run, and they do a ton of actual physical like physics calculations to come up with an output.”
But those are coded by hand, which means they aren’t easy to update or change.
AI, on the other hand, learns more with each passing storm, Thayer said. That means it can shed the biases that get coded into the physics-based models.
Thayer has been tutoring an AI on Utah’s past three ski seasons and plans to release it for the 2025–2026 winter. He says its snowfall predictions for Little Cottonwood Canyon have been within 1% to 2% of what actually happened.
As a scientist, he’s got mixed feelings about it.
“It's very, very exciting, despite the, I guess, the repercussions on my career,” Thayer said. “It's not all roses. It means busier powder days. The good forecasts yield busy days.”
The AI won’t be free. OpenSnow, which provides resort snowfall totals and forecasts worldwide, is already a paid subscription.
Thayer also claimed the AI forecaster is easier on the environment than the physics-based forecasting models that require “supercomputers.”
“You can run these [AI] on a local server like at your house — run them for the entire world — because they just run much more efficiently,” he said.
What Thayer couldn’t tell the Fall Tourism Forum: will it be an above-average or below-average snow season?
“The one thing I do know for sure is it will be better than Colorado,” he said.
