How is snow recorded?

[aznetcowboy]

Okay, this may seem like a weird question coming from Tucson, AZ USA, but we had snow yesterday. Yes, you are reading that correctly, snow. I am guessing about 3" or so. When looking at my recorded measurements, I show .27" of rain today but the snow stopped before midnight, about 10:30 P.M. yesterday. I would guess that the reading today was due to the melting of snow accumulated on the rain gauge? As snow is sure a rare event here, I am not sure what to make of this.

[Nykita]

I would say you pretty much have it figured out.. I believe 1 inch of rain = 1 foot of snow, or very close to it anyway. So, going by that your .27" rain should = 3 ¼ inches of snow.

About the only way to be accurate with snow is to use a ruler, our WS 2080 ain't smart enough to do the math...

[aznetcowboy]

I would say you pretty much have it figured out.. I believe 1 inch of rain = 1 foot of snow, or very close to it anyway. So, going by that your .27" rain should = 3 ¼ inches of snow.

Considering our temperatures were in the low to mid 30s once the snow started, it was a wet heavy snow. The total for the entire period was .47" and I would estimate the depth of the snow at about 3".

It's hard to believe this snow occurred as the normal high is 72. We had gotten up to 54 before it started snowing. Today was all the way up to 56 and is now dropping rather quickly. And it is supposed to freeze tonight. Brrrr. I know, we are a bunch of winter weather wimps here, but we make up for it during the summer with the 100+ temperatures which makes a lot of people summer weather wimps.

[Nykita]

I saw on The Weather Channel today that somewhere in either AZ or NM the temp dropped from the upper 40's to freezing in less than 20 miles.. I believe it was AZ on I-10.




Global warming at it's finest!!!