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2018/19 Winter Banter and General Discussion - We winter of YORE


Baroclinic Zone
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I don't know...I kind of loved 50F and no pack yesterday. Futility has lead to some great days to spend time outside. I love the forecasting and observing part of winter weather but if it could be 75F and all melt the day after that would be cool too. 

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11 hours ago, OceanStWx said:

I've never really bought that one, probably a drifted report. But that pocket surely had 36-42".

Amounts that differ greatly from nearby sites are suspect, which is why I wonder at the 40" reported for Dec. 6-7, 2003 at the Farmington co-op, even with a long-time and conscientious observer there.  The New Sharon co-op, 8.5 miles to the SE, reported 23", and 2 miles closer at my place had 24".  Farmington showed 14"/26" while NS co-op had all 23" by their 7 AM obs on the 7th.  I had 6/18, but record at 9 PM, at which time it was puking snow - a midnight obs would've meant something like 12/12, so that post-midnight 26" really stands out.  It was all powder and one of the windiest storms I've had here, 2nd only to Pi-Day '17, perhaps.  We were an hour late getting to church (had to basically sno-blow 2x thanks to stuff pouring over the auger housing) and the snow there - 1.5 miles from the 40" obs - looked about the same as at home.

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On 12/31/2018 at 5:01 PM, tamarack said:

My wife sent me (on Facebook) an old newspaper pic showing a payloader between 14-ft walls of snow in West Farmington following the 43" dump in Feb 1969 that brought the depth to 84" at the co-op site closer to town.  Dream stuff.

I posted that pic on a thread here.

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7 minutes ago, CoastalWx said:

Oh 69 was great for that storm here as well. 

Further west got kind of hosed on that one in SNE, In the past, I have used the NESIS for that storm as my avatar, All the eastern areas for NNE and SNE did quite well, Back west up here was good as too.

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Question for anyone who reports their precip to CoCoRaHS... @Ginx snewx @tamarack  

This is my first winter reporting to them and using a snowboard.  Tomorrow's event looks to start between 4-5AM.  I usually measure at or around 7AM.
If I measure and report tomorrow at 7AM, I will have to wipe the board clean (in order to report appropriately on Friday).  

However, wiping the snowboard after only 2 hours of snow could impact the accuracy of my total storm measurement.  
I'm inclined to measure and report at 5AM, as I'm sure there will only be a T, then take my storm total measurement when the snow stops mid-morning, and report that on Friday.  

Is that what others do for events with timing like this?  I did this for an event last week, but it looked like others took their usual 7AM reading, so my observation looked "wrong".

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15 hours ago, Hoth said:

Can anyone here speak to the veracity of the Lincoln RI report of 55" in Feb '78? Seems awful high. Stationary deform band or something?

Try to figure it out this way.  If 38" at woonsocket RI is the official amount but saw 54" then the North Lincoln RI must be 39" based of it's 55" amateur observation.  It actually quite logical and goes with the majority of the surrounding areas of Northern Rhode Island.  North Foster Hill got 36" official, North Situate 37" official.

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12 minutes ago, tunafish said:

Question for anyone who reports their precip to CoCoRaHS... @Ginx snewx @tamarack  

This is my first winter reporting to them and using a snowboard.  Tomorrow's event looks to start between 4-5AM.  I usually measure at or around 7AM.
If I measure and report tomorrow at 7AM, I will have to wipe the board clean (in order to report appropriately on Friday).  

However, wiping the snowboard after only 2 hours of snow could impact the accuracy of my total storm measurement.  
I'm inclined to measure and report at 5AM, as I'm sure there will only be a T, then take my storm total measurement when the snow stops mid-morning, and report that on Friday.  

Is that what others do for events with timing like this?  I did this for an event last week, but it looked like others took their usual 7AM reading, so my observation looked "wrong".

I would say measure at 7am. That's generally what they want. The other thing you could do is have 2 boards (or if yours is big enough just 1) and measure the liquid equivalent with one board and leave the other unwiped to let the compaction do its thing. With a large board you could maybe sneak a core sample from off the edge. Just make sure to subtract the liquid from your first sample from the final one from the second sample to get the amount of liquid for only part 2.

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32 minutes ago, tunafish said:

Question for anyone who reports their precip to CoCoRaHS... @Ginx snewx @tamarack  

This is my first winter reporting to them and using a snowboard.  Tomorrow's event looks to start between 4-5AM.  I usually measure at or around 7AM.
If I measure and report tomorrow at 7AM, I will have to wipe the board clean (in order to report appropriately on Friday).  

However, wiping the snowboard after only 2 hours of snow could impact the accuracy of my total storm measurement.  
I'm inclined to measure and report at 5AM, as I'm sure there will only be a T, then take my storm total measurement when the snow stops mid-morning, and report that on Friday.  

Is that what others do for events with timing like this?  I did this for an event last week, but it looked like others took their usual 7AM reading, so my observation looked "wrong".

I totally agree with what Dendrite and Tamarack have said.  You report once a day - let the chips fall where they may and don’t mess with your standard observations time.

That prompts a question from me though, which is about the parameter you’re reporting.  I only report 24-hour snow totals to CoCoRaHS.  Is “settled storm total snow upon storm completion” (I’m not exactly sure what it’s called) an actual parameter that is reported to CoCoRaHS?  I certainly don’t have that field in my daily CoCoRaHS reporting page – do people use the “Significant Weather Report Form” (or something similar) and make a special entry for a storm?  Is it just put in the “Observation Notes”?  Is that parameter just for other organizations like the NWS?

Trying to report settled storm totals in a timely manner seems like it would be very challenging/arbitrary in a lot of storms.  What happens in a synoptic storm that has several hours of front end snow, followed by 18 hours of warm temperatures and mix/rain or rising snow levels, followed by another 24 hours of lingering backside snow?  That sort of event isn’t really uncommon around here at all, but we’ll also have storms up here where it will snow for 3 or 4 days after the front end of the storm comes through, often with several additional inches of accumulation, because the storm stalled in Northern Maine, or the Maritimes, etc.  Then there’s the factor of the next storm or LES event coming in before the snow has even stopped from the previous storm.

Although I do actually have “storm totals” in my own data records, that’s nothing I report to CoCoRaHS.  I actually have to spend a lot of time parsing through NWS discussions and sometimes even the weather models to try to define each storm, where one ends and where another begins, etc., and I can’t imagine CoCoRaHS would have the average observer try to do that.

We see the BTV NWS report storm totals up here sometimes for significant events, but as Powderfreak will often point out if he posts them, numbers can be quite disparate when they incorporate people’s CoCoRaHS numbers depending on the timing of the storm.

I’d be interested in hearing what the meteorologists and other CoCoRaHS/Co-op observers have heard about reporting settled storm totals (do you try to report that parameter?) and how these other confounding factors are addressed.

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Last time I watched the cocorahs snow-measure product, its instructions were to record the storm at its max depth, and other info says that a snow-melt-snow sequence within an obs day should have the sum of both peaks reported.  Thus one could easily report a lot more snowfall than the depth OG.

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1 hour ago, tamarack said:

Last time I watched the cocorahs snow-measure product, its instructions were to record the storm at its max depth, and other info says that a snow-melt-snow sequence within an obs day should have the sum of both peaks reported.  Thus one could easily report a lot more snowfall than the depth OG.

Kind of related--I know there has been a lot of past discussion about 6 hour board clears vs once a day or only at the end of the storm.  Just a FYI, that NWS ALY had a cocorahs event a few months back and I specifically asked the METS about that, they said they want 6 hour clears for longer events---if your able to of course.  So that's the message they had to all Cocorahs members in the ALY zones.

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