Bulgaria Ski discussion board

In my experience, snow-forecast.com is reasonable but don't bank on anything past 2-3 days.

Mark-IOW is very good but I am sure he won't mind me saying that forecasting is an inexact science, especially when dealing with mountain conditions and if it was possible to be accurate 7-10 days in advance then someone would be making alot of money doing it.

I have learned to manage my expectations and not worry too much. There is NOTHING you or I can do about how the weather will be so there is no point getting hung up on it. There will always be something to ski in Boro whatever the weather.

Only in Borovets of course you cant see the top of the mountain when you open the curtains

The forecast is still good for Friday. I think the things is a lot depends on where exatly they measure things. I suspect that some of the sites state Borovets but have their weather systems or sats tracked on Samokov or much lower lying areas. Anybody that has been to Borovets before would know that it could be chucking down with rain in the resort but blizzard up Musala. In the same way that you could be in a blizzard up top and be 6 degrees warmer in bright sun at the bottom having gone through feezing fog half way down. Maybe i've been lucky but in 10 years i've only been disapointed for one week re the conditions

the thing you want to look for in the forecasts is precipitation. the curse this year so far is it has been too dry.

in winter, temperatures will generally take care of themselves (at least at the top of the mountain - there is of course a risk of a thaw during the day at the bottom, but generally it is freezing at night)

as an aside, if you look carefully, a lot of the websites are forecasting for other areas - generally you will get the nearest weather station in the vicinity at a similar altitude. e.g. if you put borovets in weathercast (or weatherHD on ipad) you will get the weather for Kustendil (somewhere else in Bulgaria - similar situation if you look at samokov).

However, there is a weather station at the top of the mussala mountain (i.e. above borovets). A couple of websites that give good forecasts for this weather station are:
http://www.wunderground.com/global/stations/15615.html
http://www.weathercast.co.uk/world-weather/city-weather/city/15615/mussala.html

(it is likely that both take their forecast from the same source - NCEP, who are basically part of the US government see http://www.ncep.noaa.gov/)

so...if you look at the forecast for mussala, then you will get an idea of the precipitation in the next couple of weeks, which (fortunately) is plenty. The forecast is updated twice a day, and does change as the data changes (and any weather forecast is based on a balance of probabilities)

The good news is that it looks nailed on for a good dump this weekend (but still do your dancing). there is also an added bonus of a potentially bigger dump the weekend after (which maybe is what the ski club forecast is predicting).

hope this is helpful - another approach of course is "whatever will be will be!", just wait and see (and stop looking at the forecasts!)