What Do We Do Here?
We make weather forecasts easy to understand and tailored to your outdoor sport.
We’re a team of meteorologists that is dedicated to making weather fun. The news is dominated by stories of bad weather or generic forecasts. But you like to play outside and want a quick and simple source to find your perfect weather window. You’ve come to the right place.
We don’t forecast rainbows and we can’t control the weather (yet), but we’re dedicated to helping you enjoy the outdoors.
Comments, thoughts, ideas, hopes, dreams? Email us!
Joel really (really) likes three things: Weather, snow, and skiing. After a childhood full of ski racing and teaching at Shawnee Mt in Pennsylvania, Penn State was the place to continue ski racing and study meteorology. Following his graduation at the top of his class in 2003, Joel moved to Boulder, CO to continue with college part II. While earning an MS in Environmental Studies and an MBA, it became readily apparent that forecasting snow in the mountains of Colorado is difficult. Because of this, Joel missed a few incredible powder days, and vowed to never let that happen again.
In his spare time, Joel started Colorado Powder Forecast as an email list in 2007, and found that the few years of grad school spent studying mountain weather patterns started to pay off in accuracy (and more importantly, missing fewer powder days). In 2009, Colorado Powder Forecast the website was born, and Joel become known as the go-to source for snow forecasts. In 2010, Joel left his full-time employer to live the dream of forecasting weather and skiing powder. And after a fortuitous meeting with another skiing meteorologist, Joel and Andrew Murray worked hard to bring Opensnow.com to life.
In addition to skiing, Joel hikes, bikes, climbs, storm chases, and does just about anything else outdoors. Because of this, he helped to create Chance of Weather to provide forecasts for non-snow sports.
Boulder, CO is his home base now and forever. The weather is great, the people are supportive, and it’s the best place in the world to start a business.
Hailing from the fine state of Colorado, Andrew is the brains behind the code and design of the site. He is a life-long skier, meteorologist and an expert in web design, development, and working with weather data. While studying meteorology and computer science at the University of Utah, he also built the popular site Utah Ski Weather.
After graduation, Andrew spent time working at NOAA’s National Weather Service as the Geospatial and Mobile Program Manager for Western Region Headquarters. There he was part of the team that developed and built Interactive NWS, a mobile alerting system for emergency managers. Due to this work, he was the recipient of the NOAA Administrator’s Award, a prestigious honor within the Department of Commerce.
After leaving NOAA, Andrew continued his work as a web developer in the atmospheric sciences field at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. After working about a year, he decided to follow his true passions for mountain meteorology and left to work full time with Joel on both Chance of Weather and OpenSnow.
When not programming or staring at clouds, Andrew skis, bikes, hikes, and likes to travel to far-away lands and sleep on couches (with the owner’s permission, of course).
As CTO, Andrew’s main job is to feed the penguins that run the servers, take awesome photos and videos while skiing the slopes, and occasionally go buy the six-packs.
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