powderfreak

11” of sparkling fluff. Still snowing.

Lol couldn’t have been more wrong. 10-11” of total air.

Mountain at 8” on cam. Ripping snow.

I was wrong. This mid level band has gone nuts. Fluff factor under this strong lift has been great. Outside of the deeper lift, it’s sand… but in the band, this is fluff.

Up to 5”, nice mesoscale band. I poo-poo’ed the fluff factor but this mid level lift is getting it done.

Paging @CoastalWx tomorrow.

Mid-level banding may save us up here. The lift seems to be at 700-600mb.

Enjoying the images... well documented guys. 3" up here so far, hoping for 7-12". 1 degree outside.

Yeah for sure, I'm fine with any snowfall and its fun to get in on this storm. Sometimes I just get gun shy of 10-20" forecasts on like 0.75" water. Though the soundings are ideal... the DGZ is super deep. As long as the air is saturated it should be larger flakes... which is intensity driven. As soon as the rates diminish, that arctic air wants to dry up a bit. I mean, the whole column is essentially in that -12C to -18C zone up to 500mb (18,000ft).

This is awesome observation/analysis to get during a storm! So varying from 9:1 to 18:1? I think that seems reasonable… maybe averaging out around a 14:1 if it alternates between arctic sand at lower reflectivities to 20:1 fluff under better banding when the column is fully saturated.

Yeah moderate snow at 1/-2 here. Those QPF amounts down in SNE are nuts for a cold storm in 6-hours.

ORH ASOS with 0.92” precip in 6 hours at like 6F is awesome. 3+ hours of 0.18”/hr at these temps is wild.

I mean, the QPF has been rock solid for almost two days now. 0.60-0.90” pretty much area wide in NNY, C/NVT and NNH. A 12-14:1 ratio math puts that as a 7-13” event. A 18:1 ratio is 11-16”. I’d lean on the lower end of the ratios…a tick above 10:1 but less than 15:1.

Hell yeah man!

Love the photos… distinct lack of photos too from most of this heavy snowfall. Time to document it.

Yeah call me a Debbie but I’m thinking 8-12” for the mountains and local areas. We’ll see but I envision 10” on like 0.75” water with 14:1 ratios when all is said and done. It’s usually baking powder at these temps and banking on 20:1 ratios makes me uncomfortable forecasting… especially with a dry arctic air mass lurking around the surface and just north of us. I’d take QPF and go 12-14:1 to figure it out.

-9/-15 and cloudy. This is going to be a cold snow.

Min of -20F but started rising again. Now a balmy -15F.

Man, 1” QPF in 6-hours near BOS is an absolute thumping. ORH-BOS-TAN zone is a wild output.

-13F at 7pm is a bit much.

If I had to pick one poster’s location to go to with for this storm, it might be you. Either your area or Essex County.

We've started reporting them to Parrilla to increase his data sets. We sometimes put them on the report and also started an IG account mtmansfield_snowobservations where we only post photos of the readings as a way to archive them. We have been taking photos of the readings and keeping data for over a decade and honestly, its a shame we didn't start archiving it more in the past. We are just looking to keep things transparent and to preserve the idea of measuring snowfall and depth in the same locations as often as possible. Regarding High Road depth... this is the first season I've seen that site stay with the fabled stake and even slightly exceed it at times. In all other seasons, that spot can run even a foot or two below the stake. However, we have done snow survey analysis there with the 60" Adirondack Snow Sampler (when the snowpack was a bit lower) and the numbers checked out. It appears to be legit. I have a few hypothesis, primarily going back to the November upslope snows that really built the base up... and that is that the Gondola terrain for whatever reason seemed noticeably deeper than the Quad side after a few of those storms. It has generally felt a lot snowier from like the FourRunner Quad northward towards the Notch, and I think that's normal, but it has felt exaggerated at times this year. Its definitely interesting, but man, there is still some areas of open water in there and that whole High Road zone from Rim Rock across to Cliff Trail and Perry just has a ton of snow on the ground. When you see the open water spots, its a legit like 6 feet down. Its sort of creepy at times, ha. We were skiing the Strawberry Fields below Upper Perry/Cliff intersection and there's a drainage in there with holes that look like they are 8 feet deep wells. It's impressive but certainly not something you want to fall into head first. The depth stake was stuck in the mid/upper 60s for what felt like two weeks, but finally have movement upward after this last cycle. Ticked from 68” to 70” and then 74”. One skier from MLK weekend found there way in here and left a track just behind the depth stake… not a fan of it but it’s filling in again.

I'd lower that by 30% to be honest. Even a widespread 8-12" would be a noteworthy event.

It’s a wall of precip moving north.. with easterly low level flow.