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October 2011 Banter/Obs/Disco Part III


HoarfrostHubb

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Bob had almost no snow on 3/4 but this is at my folks house in Marshfield.

post-33-0-43151200-1318632476.jpg

Wait a minute. What's the turf on top of the snow? I think you dug that ruler down into the ground. Also, any self respecting snow lover would never scatter dirt on top of a snowpack. It speeds the melting process. I'm disappointed.

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Yeah even where I am...it helps being just a bit inland. I'm only a mile inland, but just a little bit of that colder air aloft mixes down and can help me stay closer to 32 instead of 32.5 or 33 on the water front.

I think MQE maybe gets a little benefit from some very weak upslope and/or land sea convergence, but they aren't necessarily located in the best area for that, which is along the rt 3 corridor south of Braintree...where the wind is perpendicular to the coastline and is also forced up a couple of hundred feet.

Also, Pickles, don't forget...in those storms where Logan is 33 and having trouble accumulating...MQE is 32 and accumulating well. That 1degree F means everything...and this is very common along the coastline near BOS.

Some events MQE can even be 30F while BOS is 33F. Esp in events where the wind is veered more than 40-50 degrees.

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Yeah even where I am...it helps being just a bit inland. I'm only a mile inland, but just a little bit of that colder air aloft mixes down and can help me stay closer to 32 instead of 32.5 or 33 on the water front.

I think MQE maybe gets a little benefit from some very weak upslope and/or land sea convergence, but they aren't necessarily located in the best area for that, which is along the rt 3 corridor south of Braintree...where the wind is perpendicular to the coastline and is also forced up a couple of hundred feet.

Also, Pickles, don't forget...in those storms where Logan is 33 and having trouble accumulating...MQE is 32 and accumulating well. That 1degree F means everything...and this is very common along the coastline near BOS.

usually mqe is about 3 f colder than bos

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4th thunderstorm of the evening in progress... just about an inch since the first storm at 5:30pm.

Each storm has a different intensity... the first one had some good wind gusts... the second had torrential rain and virtually no wind.... the third had very loud thunder and now this 4th one has vivid lightning and some thunder blasts.

Pretty impressive for mid-October....

Yea great boomers at work tonight, most impressive in a glassed open Atrium with 20,000 sq feet of glass.

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Yes they hold cold air better than the Greens in general. The WE is higher too in their snow since a lot of the northern Greens snowfall is upslope snow with extremely high ratios. Its like LES.

Yeah it all depends on the type of season we are having. If we are surviving off upslope then we are prone to thaws but still usually better off than other MTN areas if no one has been getting synoptic events. The times when NH is much better off is when the storm track is east and the Greens miss the denser synoptic snow. I'd be willing to bet we get about the same amount of synoptic snow as the whites (around 150-200) but they do beat most VT mtns in retention and SWFEs. Per climo the further east you go the better for snow retention.

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Yeah it all depends on the type of season we are having. If we are surviving off upslope then we are prone to thaws but still usually better off than other MTN areas if no one has been getting synoptic events. The times when NH is much better off is when the storm track is east and the Greens miss the denser synoptic snow. I'd be willing to bet we get about the same amount of synoptic snow as the whites (around 150-200) but they do beat most VT mtns in retention and SWFEs. Per climo the further east you go the better for snow retention.

I have skied many a year in Maine while Stowe was bare. Overwhelmingly greater retention and density in the Whites and Western Maine" Stowe certainly gets more annually but with fluff, the W/E is greater on average in ENE elevation.

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I have skied many a year in Maine while Stowe was bare. Overwhelmingly greater retention and density in the Whites and Western Maine" Stowe certainly gets more annually but with fluff, the W/E is greater on average in ENE elevation.

That's gotta be a bit of an exaggeration because in the 8 seasons I've lived up here I've never seen that mountain not have snow while NH/ME areas do. I would be curious to look into the weather patterns that produced that if you can recall any of these years off the top of your head? There are places in VT that are poor with snow retention but Mansfield is not one of them. There's a reason why I found a patch of snow in the trees up there on July 4th this season... and why the average date of melt out at the Co-Op is in June.

I am definitely biased (no doubt about that, but then again everyone is slightly biased to their own backyard) but I have also been skiing in the east now for 23 years, religiously following ski conditions and snowfall data for 12-15 years. Of course that's not as big of a sample set as some of you guys, but IMO its hard to touch Stowe's trails on Mansfield for snow preservation. The Greens on a whole may be a bit different, but Stowe's trails are usually the first to hold snow and the last to lose it in Vermont. Jay Peak gets more snow than Mansfield but we'll be hiking and skiing Mansfield a lot longer into the spring than you can at Jay. Same early in the season... we get a lot of skiers from MRG, Sugarbush and Killington who come to hike and ski Mansfield in October when we get good early season snow.

Here's a pic from this past Tuesday that illustrates the snow retention possibilities at Stowe...its 2pm in early October and the mountain is already in the shadows. Trails face north and east and only see direct sunlight for a few hours in the morning before going into this shadow for most of the winter. In Dec/Jan the sun sets on the mountain between 10-11am. From then on its all shadows. Of course, every other mountain around here may be bare (note all the areas still seeing direct sunlight in this picture) but not Stowe's trails. The folks that cut the first trails on this mountain back in the 1930s (C.C.C. workers) knew what they were doing apparently because they picked the coldest, snowiest areas. Of course, in the time before snowmaking, it was very important to cut your trails where the snow was last to melt... and there's a reason why they didn't pick the western side of the mountain which gets blasted with late afternoon sun. You can be bare on Mansfield's western slope and still have 5 feet on the eastern side where the ski trails are come April.

NH and ME definitely have better overall snow retention, especially in the villages and towns when CAD is crucial in some winters. But I certainly have never seen a time when the northern Greens were hurting so bad with bare spots while Maine was skiing fine with great coverage.

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I have skied many a year in Maine while Stowe was bare. Overwhelmingly greater retention and density in the Whites and Western Maine" Stowe certainly gets more annually but with fluff, the W/E is greater on average in ENE elevation.

Rangeley and the Carrabassett Valley in Maine are generally the best NE spring skiing lift serve or back country.

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Forested and being NW definitely helps...esp this past winter since the gradient in that area was so strong. It happens here too...N and NW side of ORH is much more wooded (and some extra elevation) than the S and SE side of town so there is often a large snow pack gradient.

sad.gif

Wrong about what?

It being a close to normal fall. But whatever. You can believe what you want to believe.

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That's gotta be a bit of an exaggeration because in the 8 seasons I've lived up here I've never seen that mountain not have snow while NH/ME areas do. I would be curious to look into the weather patterns that produced that if you can recall any of these years off the top of your head? There are places in VT that are poor with snow retention but Mansfield is not one of them. There's a reason why I found a patch of snow in the trees up there on July 4th this season... and why the average date of melt out at the Co-Op is in June.

I am definitely biased (no doubt about that, but then again everyone is slightly biased to their own backyard) but I have also been skiing in the east now for 23 years, religiously following ski conditions and snowfall data for 12-15 years. Of course that's not as big of a sample set as some of you guys, but IMO its hard to touch Stowe's trails on Mansfield for snow preservation. The Greens on a whole may be a bit different, but Stowe's trails are usually the first to hold snow and the last to lose it in Vermont. Jay Peak gets more snow than Mansfield but we'll be hiking and skiing Mansfield a lot longer into the spring than you can at Jay. Same early in the season... we get a lot of skiers from MRG, Sugarbush and Killington who come to hike and ski Mansfield in October when we get good early season snow.

Here's a pic from this past Tuesday that illustrates the snow retention possibilities at Stowe...its 2pm in early October and the mountain is already in the shadows. Trails face north and east and only see direct sunlight for a few hours in the morning before going into this shadow for most of the winter. In Dec/Jan the sun sets on the mountain between 10-11am. From then on its all shadows. Of course, every other mountain around here may be bare (note all the areas still seeing direct sunlight in this picture) but not Stowe's trails. The folks that cut the first trails on this mountain back in the 1930s (C.C.C. workers) knew what they were doing apparently because they picked the coldest, snowiest areas. Of course, in the time before snowmaking, it was very important to cut your trails where the snow was last to melt... and there's a reason why they didn't pick the western side of the mountain which gets blasted with late afternoon sun. You can be bare on Mansfield's western slope and still have 5 feet on the eastern side where the ski trails are come April.

NH and ME definitely have better overall snow retention, especially in the villages and towns when CAD is crucial in some winters. But I certainly have never seen a time when the northern Greens were hurting so bad with bare spots while Maine was skiing fine with great coverage.

You know its bad when the SNE DISCO is compiled of posts that have to do with ski resort snow retention.

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Wait a minute. What's the turf on top of the snow? I think you dug that ruler down into the ground. Also, any self respecting snow lover would never scatter dirt on top of a snowpack. It speeds the melting process. I'm disappointed.

I had to dig through that glacier to find the bottom...lol.

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speaking of snow pack .....would it be accurate to state the white's keep there pack longer than the greens (in general) .....i just rememer sking wildcat which is mostly shaded from sun....in late april last year and they still had tons of snow ...esp above 3000'. also it would seem there is more QPF in the 200 annual inches of snowfall wildcat get's then say the 300 or so that stowe and jay get.

Maybe the west slope of the Greens but over here on the eastern side of VT, we tend to stay in the cold wedge and hold pack quite well.

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