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October 29/30 Snowstorm OBS thread


ChrisM

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See I don't know. Noone in the area says they measured more than a foot. Before the storm I asked people to measure

Well it could be close. They really got into some good banding while the DS tried tickling your fanny and reducing snow rates. So you have 980' elevation, but BDL got into a little bit better in terms of banding I think.

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Well it could be close. They really got into some good banding while the DS tried tickling your fanny and reducing snow rates. So you have 1000' elevation, but BDL got into a little bit better in terms of banding I think.

Yeah after seeing the radar finally today..they def had better banding..but it was also 34 degrees for them while it was snowing.

And I fixed your typo on my elevation

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I'm at 970 but I call it 1k. Does that make me a bad person?

Then again living at almost 1k on that side of the state ls like living at 1.5k over here

I had a sales call yesterday afternoon at the Uconn co-op.. Amazing how little snow they had and how little damage. The damage picks up dramatically as you head NW on 195 once past the intersection where Willington Pizza/Marguerita's is

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I had a sales call yesterday afternoon at the Uconn co-op.. Amazing how little snow they had and how little damage. The damage picks up dramatically as you head NW on 195 once past the intersection where Willington Pizza/Marguerita's is

Yep...I came from nearly 2' at home.Sunday night to grassy patches here...so weird. You should have texted me!

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Wonder how many of the measurements on the PNS were clearing their snow board (if they were even using one) every six hours? I suspect most people just stick the ruler in the ground and that's the measurement. That being the case means we're comparing apples to oranges assuming the observer at BDL was following proper snowfall measuring procedure (though I have my doubts about that given past performance). Along the shoreline I bet there was underestimation as the snow fell, then melted, then fell again, and people measured at the end reporting that number as the total instead of the sum of the maximum depth within six hourly periods. Compaction rates double for temperatures above 32, so it becomes harder and harder to accumulate snow no matter how hard it snows thanks to overburdening. There are plenty of temperature-based snow compaction and metamorphosis models out there for those willing to crunch numbers - Alta-LaChapelle, Pomeroy, Diamond-Lowry, and Fassnacht, to name a few. There was a confex paper floating around (I've seen it on the AMS site) co-authored by the Weather Channel of all places about creating high resolution gridded snowfall using a model based on temperature and water equivalent. So there are a number of ways to at least compute ballpark figures, but obviously nothing beats proper measurement technique. Without knowing how all the measurements were taken it's hard to dispute even with PNS in-hand, and the longer we go the better the chance of that 20.3 number sticking as it'll be up to NCDC to correct (which they won't).

This is a great post...measuring snowfall is not depth when the snow ends. That's not your storm total that's your snow depth. I bet all those PNS reports are low due to this but I also don't like the practice of just adding inches to your total if you didn't measure often enough.

I bet most areas that had max depths near 8-9" got a foot and those with 12" at the end where probably near 15-16".

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Yeah good point. If you say 2" is max you can lose from melting and 1" from compaction you're looking at a 3" inflation by clearing every 6 hrs. With a max depth of maybe 14" you could conceivable have 17" at BDL.

Seems too low for ccompaction, IMO, especially when much of the snow came from a monster band with (probably) great dendritic formation. Given continuous snowfall, I could see a hypothetical/initial 8" being squashed to 5-6" by an additional 8" on top.

Unscientific obs from a different storm, Feb. 22-23, 2009:

At my 9 PM obs time on 2/22, I had 2.0" with 0.18" LE, somewhat moist snow at near 30F, and there was another 1" by 10 PM.

Between 10P and 5:30A we picked up 18.0". Total LE from 9P to 5:30A was 1.45", so I'd guess at 1.36" for the 7.5 hr snowblitz, or 13.2-to-1. However, the bottom of that 18" was of a far different character than the top - wish I'd done separate LEs for each 6". The top 6-8" was very light, I'd guess 17-18-to-1, while the bottom couldn't have been higher than 9-10-to-1. If I'd cheated and swept every 6" (2-3 hrly) I might have had 24" instead of 18".

As accum ended at 10 A (storm total 24.5"), I had 50-51" at the stake - couldn't read it well due to snow-plaster - and by 9 PM I could see it was at 49". The next day was cold with no melting, and the snow settled to 43", for 6" lost in one day. (The pre-storm 27" snowpack was mighty solid, and probably contributed very little to the settling.)

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:lmao:

I enjoy tracking this actually...I refresh the page every 20-30 minutes and write down the number if it's different.

Since I began doing this at 8:28 PM there were 494,385 (39%) of CL&P customers w/o power. As of 11:31 PM the number is down to 469,759 (37%).

405,000 at 6 today, hmmm slowed progress with more crews?

sad an old lady in her 80s froze to her death today

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Does anyone remember the outrageous post from bdl for the early dec storm in 2003...was like 19 inches when most everyone else around them was around a foot??

since then i have never trusted them.

I understand the logic behind the six hour increments but I just personally do not agree with it, I do not really care what the nws says. I can see adding ten percent for long duration events for settling or if one recieves over eight or ten inches then the snow does settle its self just by its own weight. However I have big problems with Dec 03 for bdl and even PD2 for bwi or PD2 for Bos.

I do not believe any of the amounts in the high spots were inflated either looking at the radar loop. I easily believe that thirty inches fell with no board clearing, but with board clearing perhaps those amounts would have been five or six inches higher, at least??

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Does anyone remember the outrageous post from bdl for the early dec storm in 2003...was like 19 inches when most everyone else around them was around a foot??

since then i have never trusted them.

I understand the logic behind the six hour increments but I just personally do not agree with it, I do not really care what the nws says. I can see adding ten percent for long duration events for settling or if one recieves over eight or ten inches then the snow does settle its self just by its own weight. However I have big problems with Dec 03 for bdl and even PD2 for bwi or PD2 for Bos.

I do not believe any of the amounts in the high spots were inflated either looking at the radar loop. I easily believe that thirty inches fell with no board clearing, but with board clearing perhaps those amounts would have been five or six inches higher, at least??

BDL's number still looks easily over done even taking into account 6 hour measurements. Unless its lake effect snow, you usually won't have a 50% increase in snow total just because you measure every 6 hours.

Wet snow doesn't have a lot of compressibility. From my own personal measurements over the years, I've found that high water content snow will generally only average out to an extra 1-2" (in storms around a foot) if using 6 hourly measurements vs end of storm depth. Very fluffy dry snow with excellent snow growth will compress on itself quite a bit more so the 6 hourly totals in that type of event will have more discrepancy with the final snow depth.

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BDL's number still looks easily over done even taking into account 6 hour measurements. Unless its lake effect snow, you usually won't have a 50% increase in snow total just because you measure every 6 hours.

Wet snow doesn't have a lot of compressibility. From my own personal measurements over the years, I've found that high water content snow will generally only average out to an extra 1-2" (in storms around a foot) if using 6 hourly measurements vs end of storm depth. Very fluffy dry snow with excellent snow growth will compress on itself quite a bit more so the 6 hourly totals in that type of event will have more discrepancy with the final snow depth.

Yeah wet snow doesn't compact much at all. Throw some lighter density on top of that, and I don't think the additional weight will do much of anything on top of that cement.

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