Welcome, we've noticed that this is your first time visiting The Snowfall Project. We'd like to take a moment to introduce you to what we have to offer and where you might find it.

First and foremost is our database of weather data from the Northwest Weather and Avalanche Center (NWAC), which is a division of the US Forest Service and NOAA. Although we don't collect all the data from NWAC we do collect the major Ski Resorts from the Northern Cascades. These you can view from the Mountains menu on the top bar. We also display the NWAC forecasts from the Forecasts menu.

In addition to the storage of the weather data we've provided a service that allows the graphing of this data over time. Using the Graph link on the top bar will bring you to a page allowing you to customize a graph to fit your needs.

You may return view this introduction again if you wish by viewing the about page from the Help menu. The Options menu allows you to pick which page you are shown when you visit this sites root page. Also you can save a set of graphs that you'd like to view often (most likely ones with one of the numerious special dates)

I, Ian Turner, take privacy very serious. As such my snowfall project does not collect personally identifying information for storage. The contact form is the only place where personal information is asked for and is strictly voluntary and not stored after submited.

At this time we do not collect site visitation statistics besides the logs that Apache creates. For more information on the types of information Apache collects visit the Apache 2.0 documentation here.

As the nature of our site we do allow users to set some default preferences to enhance there user experience. We store each users preferences in a cookie on their computer. We set this cookie to the name of 'snowfall' with the domain of the website (in this case it is currently www.pnwsnow.com). The following is a view of the cookie data we have stored on your computer:

The summary of the above is as followed:

The first array is titled 'prefs' as in perferences. It stores your default homepage setting, default number of graphs and weather or not this is your first visit to our site.

The second array, which can be quiet long stores your saved graph data exactly how you entered it. In the near future I'll be updating the graphing page to allow you to load this data back into the form and edit it and resave it.