Most monitored Australian resorts are closed at this point, so the Friday April 10 through Sunday April 12 stretch is mainly a preseason snow and weather update, led by Mount Mawson. Confidence is highest from Friday April 10 through Sunday April 12, when guidance is most aligned on a windy cold change, dense snow, and only modest mainland accumulations. The mainland Alps look more like a light refresh than a true storm, while Ben Lomond is likely to miss out almost entirely.
The main storm arrives in two steps, with snow reaching Mount Mawson on Friday and spreading across Victoria and the New South Wales Alps on Saturday before tapering Sunday. Guidance converges well on that timing and on a strong west to southwest flow, but it diverges on intensity, especially in Tasmania where the spread runs from a modest event to a much more productive storm. The published snowfall call still centers on 21-31 cm for Mount Mawson, about 3-6 cm for the Victorian resorts, and just 1-2 cm around the highest New South Wales terrain. Snow levels generally run from 700 meters up to 1,300 meters in Tasmania and from 1,300 meters up to 1,700 meters on the mainland while it is precipitating, so Mawson stays cold enough for snow most of the time but mainland coverage is biased to upper elevations. SLRs mostly in the 4-8 range point to dense snow, with only a few late higher-elevation hours nudging toward 8-10, and exposed ridgelines look rough with gusts commonly 80-120 km/h and locally higher.
Monday through Thursday looks mostly dry across the Australian Alps and Tasmania. Here the guidance is much more tightly clustered, with very little new precipitation outside an isolated leftover flurry and a steadier temperature pattern. Mainland higher elevations still cool below freezing overnight, but many daytime readings recover into the 6-10 C range, so whatever falls this weekend should settle and compact quickly. Winds ease quite a bit versus the storm itself, although Mount Mawson may stay intermittently breezy longer than the mainland resorts.
From Friday April 17 into Sunday April 19, confidence drops sharply and the forecast becomes much less specific. This is the part of the outlook where the individual guidance splits on timing, intensity, snow levels, and wind impacts. The AIFS is the clear wet outlier and would spread another round of dense snow across much of the mainland, while GFS and GDPS are far leaner and often emphasize wind over accumulation. A conservative read is that favored higher terrain has a speculative shot at 3-10 cm late next week, but readers should treat that as potential rather than a firm call.
Resort Forecast Totals (Fri Apr 10 – Sun Apr 12)
- Mount Mawson – 21-31 cm
- Mount Buller – 4-6 cm
- Mount Hotham – 3-5 cm
- Falls Creek – 3-4 cm
- Mount Baw Baw – 3-4 cm
- Charlotte Pass – 1-2 cm
- Selwyn Snowfields – 1 cm
- Thredbo – 1 cm
- Perisher – 1 cm
- Ben Lomond – 0 cm