When it comes to predicting pow, Bryan Allegretto of OpenSnow Tahoe consistently delivers
If there’s one person in the Lake Tahoe region who can create a traffic jam of skiers on Interstate 80 East with a single headline, it’s Bryan Allegretto of OpenSnow Tahoe. Known by his fans as BA, Allegretto is part owner of OpenSnow and the snow forecaster for the Lake Tahoe region. Over the last 15 years, Allegretto has become the most respected source of information about where it’s going to snow and exactly how much. Allegretto’s snow forecasts are remarkably accurate, and he even grades himself on every storm to make sure he stays that way.
Allegretto is entrepreneurial minded with a background in business and meteorology, a native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Allegretto was originally a surfer and skateboarder and didn’t really have access to snowboarding, but he loved to snowboard and had a desire to work in the ski industry, and in 2006, moved to Truckee, California right out of college. He was working at Booth Creek Resorts, a company focused on ski resort operations and administration. Due to Allegretto’s obsession with skiing pow, he started forecasting snow for fun.
Because his employer depended on snowfall for business, co-workers began paying attention to Allegretto’s personal snow forecasts, and they realized he was really accurate. Soon Allegretto was being brought into company meetings to share his observations and predictions for upcoming snowstorms.

Blogging was popular at the time, so Allegretto opened his own Blogspot site for snow forecasting. Soon Allegretto’s blog forecasts found their way onto Northstar’s website, then Sierra-At-Tahoe. In 2009, Allegretto expanded into Tahoe Weather Discussion, covering the record-breaking winter of 2010-2011, when his readership exploded. Suddenly everyone in Tahoe was reading forecasts marked with the initials “BA.”
Allegretto’s business partners, Joel Gratz and Andrew Murray, were working on the launch of OpenSnow in the fall of 2011. Gratz and Murray heard of Allegretto’s snow forecasting accuracy and wanted him to join OpenSnow. Allegretto’s friends told him he should do his own thing because his readership was growing, but Allegretto had a full-time job, a family and not a lot of time.
“I just wanted to ski, chase powder and write about it in the morning,” recalled Allegretto on Episode 25 of Mind the Track podcast. “This guy’s telling me he’s going to build the website, he’s going to deal with the advertisers, I just have to write.”
Gratz and Murray offered Allegretto to buy in as a partner, but the year OpenSnow launched, the next couple winters were terrible. Despite the lack of snow, Allegretto observed that during the drought winters, the longer the dry spell, the more people logged in to read the forecast. And to keep people engaged, Allegretto came up with novelties like the “beard shaver” challenge, where he grew his beard until a two-foot snowfall in 24 hours hit Lake Tahoe. Some years his beard started resembling ZZ Top before the big storm would force him to shave.
As a proud weather nerd and powder hound, I always read both the National Weather Service (NWS) forecast and Allegretto’s OpenSnow Tahoe forecasts, and Allegretto is consistently more accurate than the NWS. However, that doesn’t stop critics from posting mean comments, sending nasty emails and accusing OpenSnow of being in cahoots with ski resorts for the advertising dollars.
“The big lie is that we overstate snowfall, because ski resorts will work with us and we make more money, but that’s the inverse of how it works,” said Allegretto. “They advertise because we have a lot of followers. We have a lot of followers because we are accurate. If we were wrong all the time, nobody would come to our site and we would get no advertising.”
According to Allegretto, the reason why OpenSnow is more accurate than the NWS is because a lot of NWS employees who write the forecast discussions are recent graduates or newer to the Sierra Nevada. Allegretto has 17 years of observational experience watching storms and model runs day after day, year after year. After a while, Allegretto began picking up on patterns that computer models couldn’t recognize, leading to more accurate forecasts.
“I am snow and ski obsessed,” said Allegretto. “Before I was paid to, I was working my butt off to write these forecasts for free from the obsession of it. Looking at thousands of model runs every season for 17 years, your eye starts to catch things.”
Other forecasters rely heavily on computer models, and when they are wrong, the forecaster will just blame the model. But because of how seriously Allegretto takes his work, he relies on his own observational experience to hone in forecasts more accurately. Allegretto hates to be wrong, so he spends the extra time, waking up at 2am to write his forecasts.
But forecasting snowfall goes beyond just looking at computer modeling and weather patterns.
According to Allegretto, ocean temperatures also play a significant factor in Tahoe winter snowfall. When ocean temperatures off the coast of California are colder, it tends to push more storms into the Sierra Nevada, resulting in more snowfall. The drought years are generally associated with warmer ocean temperatures, creating stubborn high pressure systems that block storms from dropping down from Alaska, storms that deliver the cold snow skiers go crazy over.
There’s a lot of talk about El Niño and La Niña, but does either weather phenomenon have an effect on Lake Tahoe? According to Allegretto, in a strong La Niña season, Lake Tahoe is more likely to receive above average snowfall. El Niño usually leads to warmer and drier conditions in the northern Sierra Nevada, while southern California and the Southwest receive the majority of precipitation.
Allegretto also observes webcams to guide his forecasts, especially when elevation is in question.
“Sugar Bowl always has been one of my favorites because of the tables at the base,” said Allegretto. “I check a lot of cams when I’m trying to figure out where the snow level is. When snow levels are fluctuating between 7,000 and 9,000 feet in a storm, how do you know where it’s sitting at that current moment?”
Another popular question for Allegretto is, where does it snow the most in the Lake Tahoe region?
“It snows the most northwest of the lake,” said Allegretto. “Sometimes Kirkwood, but the farther west you are and the higher you are, the more the mountains lift and squeeze out the moisture. When the clouds clear the crest and come over the lake, they start to sink and warm and hold more moisture.”
In a modern world of advanced technology and computer modeling, Allegretto’s accuracy is living proof that human observational weather forecasting is still relevant. But the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) may change all of that because of its ability to learn and adapt like a human does. But Allegretto isn’t worried about AI. In fact, he’s excited to harness AI’s learning powers so that OpenSnow subscribers can receive even more accurate forecasts. In addition to incorporating AI, OpenSnow is now pulling in weather model data from the American GFS, Euro, Canadian and The North American Mesoscale Forecast System (NAM) models, creating OpenSnow’s own model to eventually have accurate forecasts down to pinpointed GPS locations, all from the convenience of a smartphone.

There’s been a lot of talk about a big La Niña winter coming, so what does Allegretto think is going to happen?
“We are cautiously optimistic.Everything we are looking at points to above-average snowfall for this season, “ said Allegretto. “Always risky to say that. I am thinking a cold winter with at least near to slightly above average snowfall.”
But whatever is in store for us this winter, powder hounds across the northern Sierra Nevada take Allegretto’s forecasts as gospel, because he is as much a powder hound as his readers are.
Currently for a single season, an OpenSnow subscription is $31. As far as this snow-obsessed skier is concerned, it’s worth every dollar.
Read other stories by Kurt Gensheimer here.