wxmanmitch

This is how the first patch of grass I've seen in 5+ months looks. It's only melted there because of the warmth coming up from the septic tank below. Still covered pretty much everywhere except where there's some ground water melting the snow from below. Depth is 10-18" in the woods, average ~15". 23" max depth.

I have a quick time lapse video of that on my YouTube...sorry about the wobbliness, but it's pretty cool to watch at fast speed. You can see the east wind in the low levels with a southerly flow aloft. The atmosphere is very much a fluid. The cold wedge was so thin at my home I was able to penetrate it with my drone at ~1,200' AGL. I was in the low to mid 30s while the valleys were ~20° F warmer. It did thicken for a while this afternoon before the front came through with its cold rain, graupel, and wet snowflakes.

We mixed out just after sunset. Now sitting at 43.7° F after a high of 46.5° F at 8:21 PM. I flew my drone at sunset right before we mixed out. It was 32.7° F and calm at the time with some low level fog, but as soon as I climbed about 250-300' the drone started getting buffeted by a robust west wind. It reminded me of a radiation fog that we see in the valleys around here during the late summer and fall.

33.7° F and dense fog. PWS on top of the mountain in Searsburg at 2,800' about 3 miles to my NE is 49° F. Edit: It appears they've now jumped to 54° F. I had a high of 43.2° F at 12:45 AM and a low of 31.3° F at 1:15 PM. Now that is something you don't see everyday, especially in April.

We wedge. 34.1° F and dropping. Some convective rain showers from above the inversion producing large drops. Wish I were getting snow instead.

3.5" as of 10 PM. Transition to sleet and freezing rain is underway so I think I'm done. Nice little over performer here.

Heavy snow. 27.5° F. 2.3" down.

29° F/ 26° F moderate snow. Typical midwinter SWFE type snow. Instantly sticking to everything.

Is this up by Saguenay? If so, that's a lot of latitude and this season's pattern has favored that area big time. The wiki page on Saguenay says the average is 132" per year, which seems low for that far north especially if Quebec City is 119". Heck, my average is probably around 120-125". I wish my balsams looked like that. Then again being near the southern limit of their native range (they're sparse at my latitude below about 1,500' and non existent below 1,000') they're susceptible to parasites like wooly adelgid and hemlock borers which have likely become more numerous with the warming climate.

The deer vacate my area when the snow begins at the end of the fall or soon thereafter and head for the valleys. They'll return when we leaf out and stay until the snow returns the following winter. My total for today's upslope ended up at 6.0", which was a nice surprise. I had to snow blow the driveway. By the time I was down in the valley by the MA line there was only a dusting that was pretty much all but gone everywhere except for the shady areas. It never ceases to amaze me how localized these events can be.

This is how we do "spring" around here. The recent warm up put a dent in my snow pack, but there's still 20-25" in the yard and 29" at my "stake" which is in shade most of the day. The snow has that classic dirty early spring look to it with all of the spruce/fir needles and twigs on it, but maybe we can freshen it up with a little upslope tonight. It was 51° F and sunny at 9 AM, then it was rain and fog before ending briefly as snow. It didn't accumulate so it goes in as a trace. I took a ride up by Killington yesterday and I definitely have more snow here than there is up at the top of Sherburne Pass (2,150') on US 4 by the base of Pico and Killington. The deepest pack in that area was actually just to the east by West Bridgewater even though it's in a valley.

Looks like I ignited quite a debate on measuring snow, lol. I don't ordinarily clear the board as much as I did with this storm and I did report my depth change (11") to ALY on Twitter alongside with my 13" total that was obtained from clearing the board. They put the 13" in their PNS. I'll do the 6 hour clears for longer duration events from now on on one of my boards and do 24 hour clears on the other with maximum depth.

To each his own, but I just hate that the "standard" penalizes meticulousness and therefore refuse to follow it exactly. As such, I also don't see why the set standard shouldn't be questioned. I've always been one to question authority and the conventional wisdom on how things "should" be done in the interest of doing things the right way - not how one (be it an organization or individual) says it should be done. I agree with some aspects of it such as averaging and measuring at changeover time during snow to rain scenarios, but not others like the frequency of board clearing. I do count sleet toward my totals, but not freezing rain. If people don't accept or believe my totals, that's on them, not me.

This is why I have issues with the "official" measuring protocol and don't follow it exactly. You can "lose" snow with this method and it doesn't accurately capture the snow that actually falls, therefore resulting in deflated totals, particularly in cases where there's melting and compaction during the day.

What is "official" protocol then? I have 2 2' by 2' pieces of plywood that are painted white. I use one for a running total and the other for a storm total. They are placed about 25' apart to sample different parts of the yard. Usually they are within a a few tenths of an inch of each other, but in cases where there's high wind, melting, and/or compaction they can differ. During the 3/7-8/18 nor'easter the running total sum was 45", but the storm total was 36". That was a pure powder fluff bomb that had a lot of compaction. I try to get my measurements to capture the amount of snow that actually falls from the sky, which can be a trifle difficult around here. I've had one case a few weeks ago where one board had 4" of snow on it, but the other had nothing because the wind blew all the snow off. I ended up carefully sampling the snow depth by measuring down to the top of the hard old snow below in several places and ended up averaging. I forget the exact date, but I reported like 2.5".

13.0" storm total here. Net depth gain of 10.5-11". The front end was a dud, but the upslope performed as expected on the backside. I cleared my snow board 4 times (2.3" at 11 AM, 1.2" at 2:30 PM, 1.6" at 6:30 PM, 1.9" at 10:30 PM, and 6.0" at 10:30 AM today) during the storm to try and account for the compaction/melting that occurred because of the high sun angle and brief temperature spike to 33° F yesterday midday. We even had some sun poking through the overcast. Depth at the stake is 38", not too shabby for 3/23.

7" storm total here, 6" new depth. Getting some graupelly type upslope, but mostly underwhelming so far. Round 1 was a dud. This is a weird upslope event. Heaviest echoes are way west out in NYS just east of the Hudson River. Not to mention the stuff down on the west side of the Worcester and Tolland Hills...

Off to a slow start here, but things appear to be getting going more now as the TROWAL/upslope gets going. 2.3" as of 11 AM. We've added some since then, maybe about 1/2" or so. 31.0° F.

32.0° F, light snow. I had a couple of brief bursts of moderate with decent sized aggregates. We also had a brief mix with some rain and small ice pellets a short while ago. 18z NAM was colder than the past several runs and keeps me all snow overnight, but still I'm a little nervous about that sneaky warmth around 850-900 mb, especially with the brief mixing I just had. Any heavier precip should overwhelm that warmth though as it's very thin and marginal. I expect to do well with the backside stuff later tomorrow through Saturday AM. The bigger question has been for the front end tonight into tomorrow AM. Do I dry slot or have a sneaky warm layer to contend with? This will determine if I wake up to an inch or two of slop tomorrow morning or 6-8" of paste.

Around 24". Varies quite a bit though between sun and shade.

And I'm still snowing beyond that point. 12z didn't have me finishing until Saturday afternoon.

The last couple runs of the high res NAM are actually giving me a little freezing rain here tomorrow night and early Friday morning, which is interesting as I expected this would be just a snow vs. rain scenario. Warm nose is centered around 875 mb and is very thin. If we do dry slot a bit, then I could see it, but otherwise I think this is just a paste job here. Euro keeps me all snow and the dry slot mostly to my east. High res NAM destroys me with upslope Friday into Saturday. The Euro still had some light blue pixels over me at 18z Saturday! This could challenge the big storm I had 11/26-28 where I was around 2'. That event was an elevation wet snow on the front end and then upslope on the backside. The valleys had pretty much nothing.

I like where I stand with this one. Even if low goes way west, say up CT River or God forbid the Hudson Valley, the Greens will still do well with the TROWAL and upslope on the backside. It could be a bona fide blizzard here for a while Friday with the TROWAL and strong W to NW upslope combined. The wildcard here will be if the front end is cold enough for snow, but this will depend on storm track and intensity. Too far west, and the deform band is out in NYS while we dryslot and get rain. Verbatim, the 12z Euro is some brief rain after snow and then we rip on the backside. I like the look of the EPS, with the mean around a foot here.

Yes, there was a SWFE redeveloper on 11/26-27 that produced a very heavy wet snow in the higher elevations with about 13-14" here. Then we had 10" of upslope over the course of a day and half, it didn't end until late on the 28th. There were many power outages above 1K here in VT and I was out for ~36 hours. Fortunately, I've since had backup installed.