J.Spin

We’ve had a couple of days with what seemed like orographic clouds up here over the past two or three weeks, but certainly not many. I actually like how those clouds come in, help keep the temperatures comfortable, and add variety to the weather. It’s not as if they always mean rain, sometimes they just build, give you a half hour of cooler shade, then you get a break of blue for a while, and the cycle repeats. In some cases you’ll get a passing shower as well, but it’s part of what keeps mountain weather interesting.

June Precipitation: 5.45” 2019 Precipitation: 32.43" 2019 Water Year Precipitation: 50.90” June averages just over seven inches of precipitation and is the wettest month at our site according to my data records. While precipitation was more than an inch and a half below average this June, that still means plenty of liquid, so there was no obvious deficiency and the lawn and plants seem to be doing well. Even without an especially wet June, 2019 calendar and water year precipitation are still running several inches ahead of average due to a surplus of moisture in the winter and spring. November and May were substantial contributors in that regard with more than eight inches of precipitation each.

My phone alerted me of a Severe Thunderstorm Warning, presumably due to what’s off to our west:

Earlier this year I had an inquiry on the ski areas page of our website that prompted me to update the page, so I’ve done that now that we’re in the off season and I’ve had a bit of time. Like my usual north to south list of the major ski areas that I use for storm reports, I created a similar north to south list of the state’s smaller areas that are currently in operation, with annual snowfall numbers that I could scrounge up/estimate. Naturally, not all these ski areas have expansive websites like the major resorts, but I was able to get reasonably current/relevant links for all of them. I was aware of many of these ski areas, but there were still some that I didn’t know were in operation. I know there are a number of Vermonters and Vermont ski enthusiasts here, so I figured I’d pass the list along. I’ll cross post it in the ski thread as well for folks that don’t necessarily visit the NNE thread. Hard’ack (82″) Pete’s Tow (99″) Lyndon Outing Club (103″) Chapman Hill (79″) Cochran’s (88”) Cosmic Hill (104″) Northeast Slopes (91″) Pine Mountain (65″) Harrington Hill (87″) Twin Farms (82″) Suicide Six (80″) Ski Quechee (90″) Bear Creek (150″) Ascutney Outdoors (175″) Timber Ridge (145″) Bellows Falls (56″) Hermitage (150″) Living Memorial (56″)

I just ran across a piece from REI that came out just after your trip - it discusses the RASTA model for BC skiing access, and it was neat to hear how people in other states in the Northeast are starting to follow their lead. It also puts some numbers to the positive economic benefits (although $230,000 from 171 users on one day must somehow incorporate a lot of ancillary benefits). The article notes that they’re in the process of getting approval to expand the Brandon Gap terrain into Chittenden Brook Bowl. I’m not sure exactly where the terrain is, but Chittenden Brook itself appears to be across Route 73 on the opposite side of the gap. https://www.rei.com/blog/snowsports/the-new-blueprint-for-backcountry-skiing-in-the-northeast

That’s impressive considering we’re just about at the solstice, and that’s not even a high elevation spot. You can even see how the grasses in the area are just waking up as the snow melts back.

That’s absolutely my thinking. This past season was certainly strong on total snowfall, but even in my archive of only 13 seasons, it still comes in third. The stats speak to it being a notch down from the very top as well – it’s right at 1 S.D. above the mean, putting it in the top 15-20% of seasons, but certainly not top 5-10%. A strong December or February would likely have pushed it into that upper echelon. So it’s probably in that A/A- range with respect to snowfall, but I’d say it’s got to get that bump to a straight A because it now leads my stats in so many snow-related categories, and in some cases by a large margin: Snow-Depth Days (SDD) blew every other season out of the water and was a very impressive 1.75 S.D. above the mean. That puts it in the top 4-5% of seasons for that parameter. The start of the continuous winter snowpack on November 10th was again tops in the database and 1.67 S.D. ahead of the mean. That puts the season in the top 4-5% of seasons for that parameter as well. The duration of the snowpack at 163 days was tops in the data set and 1.4 S.D. above the mean, putting it in the top 10% of seasons. The 64 accumulating winter storms we had here this past season easily puts it easily in first place. That’s 1.72 S.D. above the mean and means it’s in the top 4-5% of seasons. I recorded 114 days with a trace or more of snowfall this season. I guess that shouldn’t be too surprising with the high number of storms we had, but I felt like we’ve had “snow-globier” winters, so it wasn’t immediately obvious to me. In any case, this season was well in first place for that parameter, 1.51 S.D. above the mean and in the top 10% of winters. So despite being third place with respect to overall snowfall, this season topped the stats in a number of related categories, and it’s hard to not give it the bump to the straight A. I agree, especially if snowfall, the holiday season, and occurrence of mixed precipitation systems are factored in, that this season shouldn’t get to the A+ level. I’m guessing A+ would be something like 2000-2001? I know it was pretty solid from living it and skiing it and seeing the Mansfield snowpack data for the season (green trace in the plot below), even if I wasn’t tracking the winter weather here or paying nearly as close attention to it as I do now. I’m assuming 1968-1969 would also qualify? I wasn’t alive then, but I’ve heard great things and the Mansfield depth plot (orange trace in the plot below) sort of speaks for itself. At least at our site, 2007-2008 would probably get some consideration for the A+ category because it tops all seasons for snowfall and broke the 200” barrier here. Its Mansfield snowpack data (red trace in the plot below) certainly doesn’t crush the others, but, I seem to recall it being very consistent with the snowfall and we were right in the storm track, even if we did get some mixed events. That consistency I remember, as well as a strong December (almost 70” of snow here) and holiday season sort of give it a bit of consideration for me.

I was looking at one of my reports and followed a link to the NNE thread, eventually running into the post above from PF. You can see from PF’s comment why I was just a bit hesitant to immediately lock in a grade of “A” for the season. PF is pretty objective, so when he says that December was “bad”, that certainly gives one pause. It can be tough to think back and factor in some of those slower periods from early in the season, especially when the overall tenor was decent, but it shows how helpful the NNE thread can be in an archival sense.

I honestly can’t see anything less than something in the A range either. I still like to leave the option open though because I don’t track the rain events that don’t give any accumulation, so I don’t have a great record of those down periods. (The skiing is usually poorer at that point, so it’s a chance to check out and get other stuff done anyway) A time that does come to mind though is a long stretch around the holiday period. Between December 18th and January 5th I skied once. The lack of skiing wasn’t due to family/personal/work obligations or anything like that, it had to be due to questionable snow conditions. That’s 17 days, more than half a month, with just a single day of skiing, and it spans the entire holiday break when I was off from work. As I look back at my report from December 27th, it actually took four storms (they were small) to get the snow back to the point where I considered it worth venturing out. The final third of December had just a half foot of snow at our site, which is definitely lean for our area. It’s not as if the snowpack disappeared or anything, but I’m sure it had picked up a serious crust or something. For me, snowfall is the biggest factor in grading, and with two other seasons already having more snowfall than this past one, that kind of puts an A+ off the table. Periods like the one above certainly put a chink in the armor as well. Snowpack does matter though, and it was so good (and so early) this season that it’s hard to see the grade going below a straight A.

Indeed, that was a really solid stretch of snow. The fact that the snowfall was backed up by such an impressive snowpack made it even more notable. As Tamarack and I have been discussing, it was a really good winter for snowpack, with the coverage running 163 continuous days here. That’s even more than 5 months. I’ll have to put together some graphics in that area at some point Actually, as I was writing that I realized that I hadn’t even thought about the grading thing yet, but the winter is likely to be somewhere in the “A” range when all is said and done. It’s not immediately a slam dunk because we certainly did have our share of mixed storms, rain etc., but factoring in almost 200” of snow, 5 to 6 months of continuous snowpack that contained over 10” of liquid in it at one point, and being hit by 64 storms has to push the score pretty high.

I’ve generated this season’s graph of monthly snowfall for our site. January immediately jumps out of course – the snowfall was, not surprisingly, above average, and it was certainly a notable contributor to the overall above average snowfall for the season. What’s not obvious from the graph is that it was the first above average January for snowfall here in eight seasons. So, I guess one could say we were due for a recovery at some point. Another interesting point of note is that snowfall in November was higher than it was in December, February, or March. That’s certainly not the norm. It speaks to the strong November we had, but it also indicates that snowfall wasn’t quite there in those other months. March was actually about average, but December and February, certainly two of our strongest snowfall months here, had surprisingly low snowfall for such a strong season.

For that one, I simply do last date of continuous snowpack without the 1” qualifier, in line with the methodology I discussed in my previous post, but with that system the mean date is 4/15, the median is 4/20, and the S.D. is 11 days.

Getting back to the post-winter data analysis, I do track the seasonal maximum snowpack depth. For our site during my period of record it’s got a mean of 27.1”, a median of 26.0”, and 8.4” is the S.D. That seems fairly similar to the values you reported, although I suspect the water content in the snowpack on those days would be higher at your site. Often the peak snowpack depth at our site each season will be attained from being topped off by some dry upslope snow on the back side of a storm cycle. This year I added the dates for when the max snowpack depth occurred each season, and they range from as early as 12/30 (19.0”) in the 2012-2013 season to as late as 3/16 (29.5”) in the 2016-2017 season. It’s amazing to the think of peak snowpack depth happening in December, but checking that season, December was the snowiest month. It was only modestly above average with 49.5” of snow, but I see that January and February were both notably below average with roughly that same amount (53.3”) combined. March snowfall was roughly average at 30.8”, but it just wasn’t enough to push the snowpack past that December peak.

Fantastic pic PF. I’m sure you’ve zoomed in and looked at that gorgeous cirque up top there in the middle – oh man does it look like it would provide some beautiful turns. The only issue I can see is access, at least from the side that’s shown. That’s how it was when we lived in Montana – the valleys were ~4,000’ and the peaks were 9,000’ – 10,000’. You could easily ski well into the summer if you wanted to, as long as you were willing to hike 4,000’+ and however many miles to get to the terrain. As neat as it is to have potentially skiable snow “relatively” close, it’s just not that practical for a typical day trip though. Hiking 4,000’ – 6,000’ of vertical and several miles is already a beefy hike on its own, not to mention hoofing it with skis, ski boots, and other ski gear. With all that said, it almost looks like there’s some sort of structure or something at the ridge of the cirque? Maybe access isn’t as difficult from the back side?

I know PF has been commenting on our rainfall in this neck of the woods lately because it’s been on the wet side, but I haven’t looked at the regional rainfall maps to see the details throughout NNE. It looks like there’s quite the variability though based on your numbers, so it will be interesting to see a regional rainfall map at some point.

Yes, I just checked – 10.39” through today and almost 30” for the calendar year. This year’s liquid contributed to over 130” of snow and a good supply of moisture to start the growing season. It looks like we’ve got an extended stretch of sunny, pleasant weather to enjoy now as we head through the weekend.

I do actually track that parameter in my data, and the stats are surprisingly consistent on it right now. For the largest storm of the season, the mean is 22.4” and the median is 22.5”, which was also the largest storm from this past season. Just this season I added the dates associated with those largest storms to get a sense for when they’re occurring. That’s surely going to be quite variable with dates ranging from 12/3 (19.2”) to 3/19 (21.3”), but February is the middle of that distribution with the mean at 2/6 and the median at 2/22.

Nice - as you can imagine, I rounded the averages in my data to the nearest whole number vs. leaving in the Decimal. They just happen to all be within a tenth or two of whole numbers right now so it was an easy choice for presenting the data.

Indeed, it’s got to stay cold to help that November snowpack hold on down in the valleys. The mean start date for continuous snowpack our site is at the beginning of December, but starting in November isn’t uncommon. Checking my data I see a November start in 5 of the 13 seasons in my records, so the occurrence has been running a bit under 40% thus far. Taking a look at the trends in the snowpack depths I see in my data, it looks like mid-December is roughly that “point of no return” where if there’s any sort of snowpack down, it’s just not going to go away very easily until spring. At our latitude, with the daylight and temperatures that time of year, aided by the lack of sunlight, additional clouds, moisture, and warmth intrusion protection imparted by the mountains, it’s just very hard to dislodge the snow that gets on the ground by that point. The latest snowpack start date I’ve seen in my data is December 27th, which was in that exceedingly aberrant 2015-2016 season. For late starts like that, it really seems like you have to have almost no snow throughout December, because even a modest amount by mid-month tends to stick around.

I do see that 1” snow cover metric used a lot, but I’ve never been a big fan of it because I find it too arbitrary – especially in the spring with the heterogeneous nature of the melting. It feels like a bit of a misrepresentation when the site of one’s stake has melted to zero, but half the yard still has 6 to 12 inches of snow in it. It’s even more frustrating and artificial when the stake itself is the only reason that spot has melted out, such as when the heat absorbed by the stake has melted out a two-foot circle of snow in its immediate vicinity, while substantial snowpack remains all around it. Even at the Mt. Mansfield Stake, in its highly sheltered location out of the sun, this appears to be a bit of an issue as PF noted in his post on Sunday. I did read in the CoCoRaHS literature that when you’ve got disparate coverage throughout your property/observations area, you’re supposed to make an effort to estimate an average depth and report that. That seems like a very logical (albeit hard to quality control) approach. There’s an issue I have with the averaging technique though. All winter long while we’ve got this deep snow cover, most of us aren’t roaming around our property measuring total snow depth in numerous spots and getting an average. We’re just reporting the depth at our main stake, which is hopefully in a reasonably representative spot. The part I find challenging is in the spring, when the snow melts out at the stake and one has to potentially make a transition to the averaging technique. What I observe typically happening is that the snow at my stake slowly dwindles in the spring, and I report those depths, and eventually the depth there gets to zero. If I suddenly switch to the averaging method at that point, say with a foot of snow in half of the yard, and none in the other half, I report six inches of depth. So, my snow depth report would go from zero one day, to six inches the following day. That clearly seems to be a poor representation of what’s happening to have the snowpack report suddenly jump up like that. Here’s what I’ve done to address the challenges in some of the snowpack depth reporting that I’ve encountered. As soon as I see that the snow is melting out prematurely in the immediate vicinity of my stake relative to the surrounding snowpack in the spring, I start reporting the depth outside the sphere of influence of the stake, still using the stake as reasonable point of reference. I then report that depth in the region around stake. If that starts to break into patches I’ll do some averaging with manual ruler/yardstick measurements of that region, since at that point the snowpack is typically malleable and it’s very easy to do manual measurements. Finally, when all the snowpack in the general region of the stake (this may be within a diameter of 20, 30, or 40 feet from the stake depending on how the snowpack broke up) is gone, but snowpack remains in the yard, I simply report that snowpack is at a trace. The actual area covered by snowpack is small enough at that point that it won’t have a huge impact on organizations using the data to estimate water in the snowpack for hydro concerns, and the data don’t get a sudden spike as it would if I was to start averaging in new areas. With the issues associated with measurement at the stake (especially at the fringes of the season) the snowpack “time” metric I like to use instead of days with 1” or greater snowpack is “days with continuous snowpack”. I restrict it to just my property, so there is some arbitrary component there, but I figure an acre is a reasonable chunk of snowpack reporting area to be representative. I find that easy to quantify because there’s either snow present at observations time somewhere in that geographical area or there isn’t, and our driveway gets plenty of sun so none of the potential plow piles ever wind up being the last spot with snow. This parameter isn’t really relevant for CoCoRaHS and hydro organizations, but they’ve got my daily snow depth reports for their purposes. I like this “continuous snowpack” parameter because it is extremely rare for our site to melt out once the snowpack is in place, so it gives a good sense of the snowpack duration over the season. So this season’s period of continuous snowpack was November 10th though April 21st, a duration of 163 days, which is the longest I’ve recorded at our site by about a week (vs. 2013-2014). There were three additional days with snow coverage at CoCoRaHS reporting time that lie outside that continuous snowpack stretch. So that’s 166 days with some sort of coverage, but that includes any detectable coverage, no necessarily reaching the 1” threshold. I am putting together a new stake setup this off season that will be entirely white (aside from the depth numbering) and as thin as possible (1.5-2” cylinder) to hopefully minimize the snowpack melting effects that I see with my current stake. I’m designing it in the format I see PF use for his daily measurement boards on the mountain, with a pole coming out of the center of board. I like this setup because you can just put it down and you immediately gave a nice flat surface below the stake instead of grass etc.

Below I’ve got the list of this season’s accumulating winter storms that affected our site, along with a bit of analysis. As noted in my earlier post, being affected by 64 storms makes this season the highest in that category, easily surpassing 2013-2014, which previously held the record with 58 storms. 16 of the storms affecting our site were named storms via TWC methodology, and those are indicated in the description section of the table. In terms of large storm occurrence, on the lower (6-10”) and higher (18”+) end of the spectrum, the frequency was fairly typical, but it trended above average a bit in the middle (10-15”) range. The number of storms in each category this season is listed below, with averages following in parentheses. 6”+: 7 (7) 10”+: 5 (4) 12”+: 5 (3) 15”+: 3 (2) 18”+: 1 (1) 20”+: 1 (1)

May totals: Trace Snow/8.22” L.E. May is over, so I’ve added the month’s precipitation totals above. There was no accumulating snow, but we did have some mix in during that mid-month snowstorm, so that put us at a trace. Total liquid was roughly three inches above average, and the generally cool, showery regime has been very good for the lawn. We’ve never had snow down at our location in June that I’ve seen, so I typically make June 1st the end of the snowfall season for our site. Season snowfall ended at 193.2”, which was above average, but certainly not a record. With a strong start, 2018-2019 held the lead on cumulative snowfall at the beginning of the season after more than three feet of snow in October and November. It generally hung with the top dogs throughout the season, but it could never quite pull ahead and wound up third in terms of snowfall over roughly the past decade. This season did certainly have some claims to fame though. It was very strong with respect to snowpack and total number of storms. It had the highest SDD of any season, and topped my data set with 64 accumulating winter storms, 6 more than I’d seen in any season before. As time permits, I’ll put some analyses of the data here in the thread for archiving, analysis, off-season discussion, etc.

It’s nice to see some eyewall pictures in the thread – we certainly miss your reports and all your great photos. I was watching TWC the other morning and heard about the day after day of 90s F in the southeast and realized how lucky we were to be out of that up here. Despite the faux HHH trolling by the usual suspects in the main threads, I think most folks around here appreciate the fairly cool weather we typically get throughout the summer, especially in NNE.

PF, I just checked the CoCoRaHS precipitation totals for the state as of this morning’s reports, and seven sites (including Stowe 0.2 SW) have now passed the 8” mark. Our lawn has definitely been loving this weather as it wakes up from its winter slumber.

Thanks for the data PF. This moisture has been welcomed at our site because it’s allowed a couple of dry areas on the lawn to start to recover from last summer’s dryness. With the climate here along the spine giving us ample moisture, the lawn is definitely not used to any sort of extended dry periods. Yesterday I did the first mow of the season, but it was only partial because I’ve still got some spots that can probably go another week. That’s pretty much on schedule, but unfortunately it means that spring honeymoon period is mostly over now. As usual it’s just about the time that skiing is winding down, so that works out well. Of course, biking season is now ramping up.