The MetService predicted a southwesterly swing would bring snow to 100m across the Southern Lakes and Central Otago yesterday which should see Coronet Peak reopen tomorrow, a week after warmer weather closed the skifield.
Coronet Peak Ski Area manager Nigel Kerr expected 20cm of snow to be "scattered" on the field over yesterday and today after 5cm fell on Thursday night.
"The guns will make quite a bit more than that, particularly the way they are going at the moment.
"Touch wood we will be grooming for tomorrow [Saturday] morning and hopefully open ... [with a] 30cm to 40cm base by Sunday."
Mr Kerr said "in an ideal world" the field would open with both the Coronet Express gondola and Meadow Express chairlift operating, along with the learners’ slopes, but would make that call late yesterday.
"I’ve seen these [snowmaking] guns do miracles, I’m not writing off anything yet.
"We’re all entering the busiest time of the winter and we’re going to have to ramp up from zero to absolute full noise in a very short time."
Across the Wakatipu Basin, the Remarkables Ski Area manager Ross Lawrence said the conditions would build a better base on the existing trails that were open and would allow them to open the Alta Quad chairlift for novice skier access yesterday.
However, he did not expect the conditions would be enough to open extra runs by Monday.
"Right now we’re hammering the high-traffic areas accessed by the two chairlifts that we have open — Sugar Bowl Express and Kirby Basin Express.
"It’s been -5degC and -6 degC overnight [Thursday], so a really good period ... for snowmaking that should continue throughout the weekend and into Tuesday ... then there’s only a short period of warm before it goes cold again."
Mr Lawrence expected the southwesterly storm to dump up to 15cm of snow by tomorrow, adding to the 5cm that fell on Thursday night.
"It should make the trails we have operating better quality and a lot wider."
During its closure, Coronet Peak staff were shifted over to work at its NZSki stablemate the Remarkables and this helped with the "pastoral care" of workers, Mr Kerr said.
"We’ve been fortunate in that Remarkables has been working at more than full noise for the week, so a lot of our staff have been re-deployed there — it has actually balanced out quite well."
Meanwhile, the patchy start to the ski season was something operators would need to get used to as the impacts of global warming would lead to shortened ski seasons, University of Otago School of Geography climatologist Prof Nicolas Cullen said.
"We’ve had the warmest May ever for New Zealand at 2degC above average [and] that follows from the warmest and wettest winter [on record] last year," Prof Cullen said.
"There’s a climate change signal there consistent with the general warming trend for New Zealand."
Prof Cullen said by the end of the century the ski season in Queenstown could be reduced by as much as a-half of its current 90-day to 100-day average.
"We’ve done some snow modelling and ... by the end of the century we would expect those snow cover days to decline.
"We’ve estimated it could vary between 20 to 50 snow days less than the current average."
The modelling also indicated the average altitude where snow formed on mountains — the snow line — would rise "by 100m to 200m at least, by the end of the century".
This would mean skifield operators were going to have to shift their infrastructure higher up mountains in the long term.
However, Prof Cullen was confident the ski industry would be able to adapt to the changes, as they were doing now.
"The ski industry has got really good at making the snow and utilising the snow that they have. "They’ve never been better at that. They put on a really high-quality product for people despite the difficulties of their warmer starts to the season."
