vertical-endeavour.com

This is a thread to list and discuss all sites (or even phone-in numbers) that offer weather / current conditions reports for the Drakensberg. Increasingly I come across different sites that offer something, and the good old SA Weather Service has moved towards a paid subscription service. Would be nice to have all the alternatives listed, and also an ongoing evaluation of the accuracy and usefulness of various reports, also to understand where the data from these reports comes from.

So, I'll add to this myself later, but let's hear it from the rest of you!

I now use weather 24 or the cathedral peak hotel web cam or the tiffindell web cam which is quiet use full.It will be interesting to see what comes of this thread as weather is a struggle for the berg, i also phone Witsieshoek.

www.windguru.com

Once you've registered (free), you can make your own custom spots using Google Maps and it gives you a forecast for that spot (averaged from the closest grid forecasts). They have 7-day forecasts but I have found that they only get accurate a few days in advance. And by accurate, I mean scarily so! The site gives 3-hour intervals for temp, rain, high/med/low cloud cover, wind speed & direction.

I think the main reason I find it so reliable is that it's much better at describing the forecast to you due to the wealth of information presented than a simple "partly cloudy 30% thunderstorms" type of forecast. It also takes spot altitude into account, so if you mark a spot on the escarpment, the forecasted temps will be about 10 degrees lower than the forecasts for Cathedral Peak Hotel, for example.

e.g. From these forecasts, you can tell that between 11am and 2pm they predict 3mm of rain, 0% high cloud cover, 0% medium cloud cover & 70% low cloud cover. In the berg, this means you're probably going to be above a sea of clouds in beautiful sunshine on the escarpment.

And no, I don't get commission!

I find I've never really been able to get accurate weather forecasts for the Berg during summer months. Once the SA Weather Service predicted no rain, and we had torrential downpours and hail at times. Another time we almost cancelled a hike as they were issuing warnings for heavy rains and flooding in the area. We took a risk, and it didnt rain a drop!! So now days I take any summer forecasts with a pinch of salt!

One good thing is that winter weather is pretty much very predictable, either its sunny blue skies, or its a cold front, which can be predicted quite accurately. One can check the Underberg forecast for temperatures, but minimum temperatures under stable winter conditions can be quite variable according to topography. It seems Underberg minimum temperatures represent the coldest temperatures which will be found in the temperature inversions in the area, so if youre not camped deep in the bottom of a flat valley, the minimum temperatures are likely to be a good couple degrees higher than Underberg.

Here is a site i bumped into the other day, am not sure where it obtains its info from. It looks quite interesting though.


www.mountain-forecast.com/peaks/Giants-Castle/forecasts/2500

Thanks Stijn, that will be really usefull for the future