“Believe me, we will be talking to every weatherman and -woman in New England, and crosschecking their forecasts,” said Tiger Shaw, president and chief executive of the United States Ski and Snowboard Association. “The chances of having the right weather are pretty high, but they’re not 100 percent.”

Gillian Galford, a professor in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Vermont and the lead author of the 2014 Vermont climate assessment, said in an interview last week that average temperatures in November for the next 20 to 30 years were unlikely to rise enough to prevent powerful and technologically advanced snowmaking operations from producing sufficient snow to host World Cup races. Galford added that winter precipitation in Vermont over all would most likely increase.

But Galford also said that worldwide, and in Vermont, temperatures had become more volatile from year to year.

“It’s going to be up to the World Cup to decide how much risk of variability they’re willing to accept,” Galford said.

Temperatures are indeed creeping up.

On Vermont’s Mount Mansfield, which has a similar elevation to Killington’s peak, the average November temperature has risen 2.5 degrees in the last 10 years compared with the average temperature from the mid-1950s to 1980, according to Andy Nash, meteorologist-in-charge at the National Weather Service in Burlington.

Still, World Cup officials are highly motivated to bring races closer to the major population centers of the United States where winter activities are popular.