Your Snow Totals (February 5-6, 2010)

We need your help, Alleghenies.  We need you to leave a comment on this post with your snow totals, your name, and where you measured.  Take a look inside this post for how to measure snow effectively.

You can also share them with us via Twitter.  Just send a reply to @wjac_weather.

Thanks in advance for all your help.  We’ll keep you updated through the storm.

Here’s a few guidelines I grabbed from the web on how to measure snow…

Here’s the website with complete measuring details. The most important section is below.
Please take a minute to look at this website!

• Measuring Snow Website

Measuring Snowfall – New Snow Amount

Snowfall is the maximum accumulation of fresh snow during the past day prior to melting or settling. We measure snowfall to the nearest 0.1 (one-tenth) inch. Maybe you have a ruler in tenths like me, but many don’t. Since snow melts and settles, you may have to measure during or soon after snow ends in order to capture how much accumulated. By 7 AM their may be less.

For example if the snow begins to fall in mid morning, accumulates to 4.2″ by 3 PM and then stops and begins melting and settling such that by 7 AM the next morning you only have 2.6″ of snow on your snowboard, then the correct number to report for your 24-hour snowfall (new snow amount) is 4.2″ — the accumulation prior to melting and settling. If the ground was bare prior to this snow your snowdepth (total depth of snow on the ground) would be rounded to the nearest half inch and would be reported as 2.5 inches.

The trick in measuring snow consistently is simply finding a good place to measure and a firm surface (such as a snow board) for your ruler to set on. Some people use low picnic tables, some use their car. I don’t recommend sidewalks since they tend to accelerate melting. Grass is where snow accumulates first, and it is OK to measure on grassy surfaces, but please know that the snow tends to sit up on top of the blades of grass, sometimes by one to three inches. Your ruler, on the other hand, will go right down through the snow and grass to the ground and give you an exaggerated reading. Just be careful to measure to the bottom of the snow not to the ground.

Measuring new snow accumulation is easy when the snow falls without wind and isn’t melting on the ground. But when the wind blows, measuring snow becomes a real challenge. We deal with drifted snow by simply taking many measurements from a variety of locations and averaging them to get a representative measure. You will get the hang of this — with experience.

If you use a snowboard, take a core sample and then be sure to clear the board after your measurement and set it in a nearby location level on the surface of the new snow. If you leave it down in a depression, it will tend to collect more snow from drifting if the snow continues.