Mike Ruzek will be the first to tell you he is not a professional meteorologist — or a climatologist or a psychic. But for the past two decades, he has developed an uncanny ability to predict when a snowstorm is likely to hit Utah, Colorado and Wyoming ski resorts, oftentimes with more advance notice than traditional weather forecasts.
To do it, he relies on a specific buoy located 186 nautical miles northwest of Hawaii’s Kauai Island, in the Pacific Ocean. The buoy is just one in a vast network managed by the National Data Buoy Center (part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) that collects information about wind, temperature, waves and other variables to provide experts with insight into weather conditions and patterns in the world’s remote waters.
Technically, the buoy is known as Station 51101. But among Ruzek’s friends and thousands of skiers, it’s known as the Powder Buoy because its activity can indicate a forthcoming snowstorm with two weeks of advance notice. Just enough time to – cough, cough – plan to catch a cold and call into work, Ruzek jokes.
“Plenty of people think I’m a kook,” he said. But Ruzek has data on his side. “I did a back study, maybe five years, and I found that it was like 70-some-odd-percent accurate.”
So, how exactly does this work? Ruzek, a wealth management professional, was first introduced to the network of buoys back in 2004 by a client who moved to Maui, where surfers use them to track swells. This client noticed a correlation between massive swells in the Pacific Ocean and then, about two weeks later, snow back in Park City, Utah, where Ruzek lives.
As a lifelong skier, this piqued Ruzek’s interest. He followed the buoy’s activity online for a while and noticed when its wave height “popped” – meaning increased drastically from about 5 feet to 15 feet or more – snow would usually arrive at his home mountain within a couple of weeks. This secret insight enabled Ruzek and his friend to chase powder days with increased success.
“It was really a tool I used for myself to plan my skiing,” he said. “So if I knew that Tuesday (or) Wednesday two weeks from now it might snow, I’d leave mornings open and go to Little Cottonwood Canyon and go skiing, and then be back in my office by 11:30 or 12 and have it dialed in.”
The Powder Buoy stayed something of a secret until about 2009, when Facebook began allowing public pages. Ruzek began posting what would otherwise be a mass-text to friends to the Powder Buoy Facebook page. Between that and its Instagram page, @powderbuoy, Ruzek now has more than 60,000 followers hoping to cash in their sick days during a winter storm. That includes many in Colorado, which often sees similar weather shortly after Utah because of its proximity.
“It’s taken off on its own since then, not by any sort of real intent on my end,” Ruzek said. “I think people love skiing, I think people love something that’s a little bit different. And I try to make it not super serious, and really try to keep the ski stoke going and alive.”
The Powder Buoy’s following suggests skiers beyond Ruzek’s circle have found its insights trustworthy, and according to one expert, the data to back it up may not just be anecdotal.
Andrew Winters, assistant professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Colorado, studies extreme weather events and precursors that can help predict them. Winters said models can reliably forecast temperature up to 10 days in advance because of the tools available to track wind, which shifts hot and cold air around in the atmosphere.
Forecasting precipitation is trickier, however, because scientists don’t fully understand the processes that happen to convert vapor into rain, snow or hail. “That’s happening on such a small scale within clouds that we either don’t have the ability to observe it or really understand the dynamics or processes as rigorously,” Winters said.
That said, there are some key indicators to predict heavy precipitation. Winters points to the jet stream, a ribbon of rapidly moving air located about 12 kilometers above the Earth’s surface. Conditions in the north Pacific Ocean near Hawaii impact how the jet stream moves, Winters said, and provide clues about subsequent weather events in Colorado. If the jet stream dips south into the southwestern U.S. a few days before a snow event, for example, that heightens the potential for a bigger dump on the mountains.
Wherever the jet stream tends to be focused is where there’s potential for a strong low-pressure system to develop, Winters said. Low-pressure systems can cause wind and, therefore, waves to be more dramatic – and maybe even cause a buoy to “pop” – and increase the potential for the jet stream to move into a powder-friendly position.
How the i70things Instagram page became a fixture of Colorado travel
“Some work that our group has done has been trying to understand what configuration of the jet stream over the north Pacific favors big snow events in Colorado about a week or so later,” Winters said. “What we’ve found is that when the jet stream over north Pacific is what we call retracted – basically where it doesn’t extend east of the date line, it stops near Hawaii, effectively – that can usually be an environment that allows for that jet stream branch then to dip south into the southwestern U.S. and serve as a precursor to a big snow event in Colorado about a week or so later.”
This phenomenon even has a name, Kona Lows, “because they’re low-pressure systems that develop in the vicinity of Hawaii and they preferentially do occur under those jet stream patterns I alluded to before,” Winters said.
However, Winters cautioned that this reaction isn’t a guarantee and suggested folks look at the buoy’s activity alongside other forecast data from Colorado Avalanche Center, a website called Tropical Tidbits and other resources to get a more complete picture of the expected weather.
To his credit, Ruzek agrees. Over the last 21 years, he’s learned that low-pressure systems are often what causes dramatic buoy movement and he began combining his data with insights and forecasts from the University of Utah’s atmospheric sciences department to provide more accurate predictions. People have even approached Ruzek to talk about creating an algorithm or formula that ensures a powder day, but that, he feels, that would defeat the purpose.
“Part of it’s like, grandma’s big toe hurts, so it might snow — that kind of folklore/legend side of it. I like keeping that,” Ruzek said. “Skiing is not supposed to be taken that seriously anyway. This is all about having fun.”