For the past decade Evan Thayer has served as the Utah forecaster for OpenSnow, a popular online weather app and blog.
Next week, he’ll also join The Park Record family as a columnist, and he’s looking forward to it.
“I’ll deliver forecasts, and do them in a fun, engaging and irreverent tone, which I feel is great for a local publication,” he said. “I’ll take weather as a basis and add in some fun facts, knowledge trivia, and apply that to a more Summit County-focused way of how the weather will affect Deer Valley and the Park City Mountain resort.”
The idea for the column, scheduled to start Wednesday, Nov. 29, is about educating and informing readers, Thayer said.
“But it’s also about making weather fun for readers,” he said.
Thayer’s love for weather reaches back to his toddler days growing up in the Lake Tahoe area of Nevada and California.
“Skiing was a part of my life from as soon as I could walk, and I also became fascinated by the big, powerful storm systems that slammed the Sierra Nevada area from the Pacific (Ocean),” he said. “So, I have been obsessed with skiing and weather since I can remember. But I don’t know if I was into skiing because of weather or if I was into weather because of skiing.”
Thayer fed his obsessions throughout his childhood, and into his late teens and early 20s.
“When it came time to pick a university to go to, I picked one that had a good atmospheric science department, because I knew I wanted to continue to study that,” he said. “That led me to Colorado State University.”
Thayer enrolled with the idea of pursuing a master’s degree and landing a career in hurricane forecasting.
“Colorado State has a well-regarded hurricane forecasting program, which seems a little strange, because Colorado is one of the most land-locked states there is,” he said with a laugh.
While studying atmospheric science, Thayer also earned a degree in computer science.
“I finished my degree in 2008, right around the time the economy collapsed,” he said. “Since I didn’t want to go further into debt, and in order to get a job, I had to leave forecasting. So, I got a job doing programming.”
Thayer moved to Utah in 2009 to ski, and that’s when he rekindled his fascination with weather.
“It didn’t take long for my friends to realize that I always knew when it was going to snow,” he said. “And that turned into me writing a daily blog forecast that, for the lack of a better word, snowballed and became my full-time job.”
Still, Thayer’s blog had humble beginnings.
“It was literally an email distribution list that would tell my friends the best day to go skiing and when we were going to get the most snow,” he said. “I kept getting requests to add new emails, and in no time I had a few-hundred people on the list.”
To accommodate more requests, Thayer decided it would be easier to write a blog, where anyone could access it anytime.
“More and more people followed the blog, and I remember looking at my stats after we had a big storm cycle, and saw 10,000 people in the data had read the blog,” he said. “So, I started offering advertising and began getting a side income.”
In 2013, OpenSnow approached Thayer about the blog.
“They were doing something similar in Tahoe and Colorado, and asked if I wanted to join forces,” he said. “I said, yes, and now I contract with them to write the Utah forecast, something I’ve been doing for 10 years.”
To write his blog, Thayer wakes up at 4 every morning and turns on his computer.
“There are a number of sites I use to directly access raw model data, and these sites use buoys and collect air and temperature soundings from all over the world,” he said. “There are millions of inputs that go into global forecasting models, and I look at the ones that pertain to the certain situations I’m in.”
Those situations include different parameters such as precipitation, temperature and wind, Thayer said.
“I access the raw and contextualized data and then I analyze it in regards to how it impacts Utah,” he said. “Every model has different biases, and it’s my job to figure out which has a better handle on what I think is going to happen. Then I write about how that’s going to impact the upcoming week.”
Last season’s record snowfall is something Thayer had never experienced before.
“It wasn’t like I was only forecasting one storm,” he said. “There was one storm, and then another storm coming in the next day, and then another storm coming in two days after that. It never stopped.”
Thayer confessed the forecasts last year were the most fun of his career.
“It was also the most exhausting winter of forecasting I have ever done, because there was no rest for me from Nov. 1 to mid April,” he said. “But I would happily relive that all the time if I could.”
In the meantime, Thayer, who splits his time between Sandy and Eden with his wife, Christine, 3-year-old son, Zephyr, and family beagle Raya, looks forward to the new season, as well as his new chapter with The Park Record.
“Like everybody else, I’m praying for snow and ready to get these powder days started,” he said.