Inflated snow reports flattened by iphone

BBC news has really been cranking up the snow news today, live reports from every inch of the country, stories of road ‘misery’ and ‘a few hardy souls’ venturing out on the high street to get their shopping (while someone walks past quite normally with a hat on).

While they fluff up the snow reports here, proof that ski resorts have actually been inflating their snow levels has emerged in the US. A Dartmouth College study ‘Wintertime for Deceptive Advertising’ has found that while resorts routinely report 23% deeper snow at weekends, US government weather research show there is no such pattern.

Suspicions of opportunism grow when it’s revealed that it’s the ski resorts without money back guarantees but with local customers that are the worst offenders, rather than resorts whose customers fly in and take a punt on there being lots of the fluffy stuff about.

The days of white out deception may already be over though, John Zinman one of the report’s compilers said that social media means the word on the snowy street is out and it had better marry up with the resort’s claims:

Zinman saw evidence of this in his research. During the study period, an iPhone application was released that allows skiers and snowboarders to report conditions themselves.

“Once that came online, exaggeration by resorts fell very sharply,” Zinman says. “And [it] fell all the more sharply at resorts that have good iPhone reception.”