Please join the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines as we welcome Joel Gratz, founding meteorologist at Open Snow, presenting a hybrid seminar titled Chasing Powder and Finding Weather Windows for Outdoor Adventures on Wednesday, November 1, 2023 at the Colorado School of Mines.  

Joel Gratz, the founding meteorologist at OpenSnow, will discuss how to read weather forecasts and snow reports so that you can plan your perfect days on snow this winter. In addition, Joel will discuss the outlook for the upcoming season, new weather technology that is being developed by OpenSnow, how far out we can trust forecasts, what shifts that we are (and are not) seeing in the climate, and also new year-round weather features that will allow you to use OpenSnow to plan non-snow adventures during any month of the year. Also, Joel will walk through the OpenSnow application and other weather visualizations in real-time. And finally, Joel will be happy to chat about the business side of OpenSnow, including what it took to get the business started.

Joel Gratz is the founding meteorologist and Colorado forecaster for OpenSnow, a mobile app and website that provides snow forecasts, travel advice, and year-round weather data to millions of skiers, snowboarders, and adventurers every year. Joel graduated from Penn State with a degree in meteorology and then earned his MS and MBA from the University of Colorado. As a die-hard skier and powder seeker, Joel spent years studying local weather patterns and made his first public snow forecast in 2007 to an email list of 38 people. When he’s not forecasting and running the business, Joel talks excitedly about weather to anyone who will listen and he also finds plenty of time to enjoy the outdoors through skiing, biking, hiking, and even chasing and photographing thunderstorms and tornadoes. Joel, his wife, and son Levi live in Boulder, CO, but when the snow flies, they hit the road to personally test his forecasts.