NNE Winter Thread

[powderfreak]

Been snowing nicely at home.  Only started accumulating an hour ago though, probably 1/2" per hour type average.  Though with upslope it seems to vary by the minute from flurries to moderate bordering on heavy snow then back to -SN.  Seems like it can do that 5 times within 30 minutes, lol.

Crappy iPhone pic walking the dog on the Rec Path past Sushi Yoshi... a quality winter evening.

[alex]

Decent snow now. About 1/4"

[powderfreak]

Decent pulses moving through.

[J.Spin]

Event totals: 1.3” Snow/0.11” L.E.

 

Details from the 6:00 P.M. Waterbury observations:

New Snow: 1.2 inches

New Liquid: 0.11 inches

Snow/Water Ratio: 10.9

Snow Density: 9.2% H2O

Temperature: 33.8 F

Sky:  Light Snow (2-6 mm flakes)

Snow at the stake: 9.0 inches

[powderfreak]

Snowy evening up and down the Spine this evening.  Quite a downward drift with the unbocked flow.

 

Steady light to moderate snow, mid-winter vibe and about as expected.  2-3" at home and 3-6" Mtn still looks like a good bet.

[alex]

17 minutes ago, powderfreak said:

Snowy evening up and down the Spine this evening.  Quite a downward drift with the unbocked flow.

 

Steady light to moderate snow, mid-winter vibe and about as expected.  2-3" at home and 3-6" Mtn still looks like a good bet.

Same here. Hard to tell the amount, it's quite windy

[powderfreak]

Just now, alex said:

Same here. Hard to tell the amount, it's quite windy

Ha!  That's a sweet snowpack right there.  Like 18" on that table!?

[J.Spin]

Event totals: 3.5” Snow/0.19” L.E.

 

Temperatures have come down and flake size has definitely come up this evening so we’ve got a much fluffier consistency of snow falling now.

 

Details from the 12:00 A.M. Waterbury observations:

New Snow: 2.2 inches

New Liquid: 0.08 inches

Snow/Water Ratio: 27.5

Snow Density: 3.6% H2O

Temperature: 21.7 F

Sky:  Snow (2-15 mm flakes)

Snow at the stake: 11.0 inches

[J.Spin]

Event totals: 4.8” Snow/0.23” L.E.

 

Details from the 6:00 A.M. Waterbury observations:

New Snow: 1.3 inches

New Liquid: 0.04 inches

Snow/Water Ratio: 32.5

Snow Density: 3.1% H2O

Temperature: 18.1 F

Sky:  Light Snow (1-2 mm flakes)

Snow at the stake: 11.0 inches

[STILL N OF PIKE]

8 hours ago, powderfreak said:

Ha!  That's a sweet snowpack right there.  Like 18" on that table!?

Stowe reporting 6” new overnite

[mreaves]

Looked like 2.5" - 3" on the back deck and 1" or less in the front, less wind protected area.  Not a bad little refresher that I was completely ignoring while focusing on the impending doom of the end of the week.

[MBRI]

Pittsburg Johns WX 6" over night

[powderfreak]

3 hours ago, STILL N OF PIKE said:

Stowe reporting 6” new overnite

Wind hammered.  Gondola and FourRunner remain on wind hold.  Sounds brutal up there with temps near zero and 50+ gusts.

[borderwx]

3” here. Easy cleaning as it was blown over onto one side of the truck and driveway

still in the snow globe in the valley 

[mreaves]

Just now, borderwx said:

3” here. Easy cleaning as it was blown over onto one side of the truck and driveway

still in the snow globe in the valley 

Snow globey here in Montpelier too.  This event has outperformed my expectations, mainly because I din't really have any.  I await the end of the week event with fear, dread and resignation. 

[powderfreak]

2 minutes ago, borderwx said:

3” here. Easy cleaning as it was blown over onto one side of the truck and driveway

still in the snow globe in the valley 

I can't say for sure at home but maybe 2.5" here?  It has blown all over the place so it's more like 0-5" on the old slick snow surface.  Cool mini-drifts around the corners of the house.

Still snowing lightly but snow globe snow, where sometimes it seems like the big fluffy flakes are actually traveling upward not downward.  Hard to say if anything is actually making it to the ground or if they are just suspended there, lol.

[wxeyeNH]

Green and Whites have their snow shields on so I only get flurries here.  Flurries much of yesterday afternoon, last night and today.  Just partly cloudy but flurries in the air so far so far all day today (1pm)

When I moved up here from Boston 17 years ago I knew there would be more synoptic snow storms.  What I didn't realize is how many days there would be snow in the air.  I seem to be right on the southern edge of the flurries.  The terrain really starts to flatten out south of me but I still get enough lift to generate something.  So when you guys report inches, I get dustings or nothing.

Anyway about .5" yesterday so Im around 32" for the season.  I'm losing ground in the snow race with all this upslope stuff north of me.

5" cement otg.  Let's see what if left after Friday.  I bet I'll still retain most.  Really in a great CAD place so will take awhile to scour out the cold air.  Have not hit 45F since I believe Nov 8th.  Will I make it through this torch staying under this figure???

[tamarack]

We get the CAD here, but almost always siggy downslope on W-NW winds, so nary a flake since mid-afternoon yesterday, just windy and cold.  Last time we got over 40 was Nov. 9 - that would be a good run in Jan-Feb, amazing for so early in the season.  Pack is 10" of solid stuff that I can walk atop perhaps one step in three (and I'm not small), with yesterday's couple inches on top.  Some of that mass should survive the Fri-Sat disaster, though I'll be enjoying 50-60° RA in SNJ, so won't know until we return.

[J.Spin]

Here’s what I’ve seen reported for 48-hour totals from the Vermont ski areas, which includes the initial as well as backside snow for this latest storm.  North to south listing is below:

 

Jay Peak: 12”

Burke: 6”

Smuggler’s Notch: 5”

Stowe: 6”

Bolton Valley: 4”

Mad River Glen: 4”

Sugarbush: 2”

Middlebury: 0”

Suicide Six: 1”

Pico: 3”

Killington: 3”

Okemo: 2”

Bromley: 2”

Magic Mountain: 4”

Stratton: 3”

Mount Snow: 1”

[powderfreak]

1 minute ago, J.Spin said:

Here’s what I’ve seen reported for 48-hour totals from the Vermont ski areas, which includes the initial as well as backside snow for this latest storm.  North to south listing is below:

 

Jay Peak: 12”

Burke: 6”

Smuggler’s Notch: 5”

Stowe: 6”

Bolton Valley: 4”

Mad River Glen: 4”

Sugarbush: 2”

 

That worked out about as I was thinking... Burke getting 6" though is a little surprising given the style of snow (NW flow upslope).

It's been snowing all day here in town, no accums but great mood snow currier and ives style while doing some Christmas shopping.

[J.Spin]

Just now, powderfreak said:

That worked out about as I was thinking... Burke getting 6" though is a little surprising given the style of snow (NW flow upslope).

It's been snowing all day here in town, no accums but great mood snow currier and ives style while doing some Christmas shopping.

Indeed, it was a nice refresher, both on the slopes and in the valley.  The snowfall had slowed down and flakes were small at the house at observations time this morning, but there was a resurgence after that with some nice big flakes.  I was up at Bolton for some turns this morning, so I’ll pass along my observations from there as soon as I get a chance to write that up.

[J.Spin]

I headed up to Bolton Valley this morning for some turns, so I’ll pass along some snow info and images.

I was sort of surprised to see the mountain only reporting 4 inches of new snow this morning, especially since we’d already picked up about 5 inches down at the house.  Granted, the resort is probably measuring one settled morning total, and I was catching six-hour increments, but generally they still report substantially more (typically double) compared to what I record at our place down in the bottom of the Winooski Valley.  I figured that they might have missed out on some of the snow because the Froude number was suggesting it was blowing downwind of the spine, but after touring around at the resort today, I can say that definitely wasn’t the case.

I was actually planing to earn some turns and ski tour a bit before the lifts opened at 9:00 A.M., but I was up there later than I’d hoped and it was right around opening time.  That didn’t matter too much though, because winds were fierce and the Vista Quad wasn’t even running, so I just headed off to Wilderness for a tour as I’d initially planned.

With those harsh winds, you’d be hard pressed to know that much snow fell at all from just looking around the base area parking lots.  The accumulations were really patchy on a lot of snowbanks because the new snow had been ripped away and sent elsewhere.  Once I got onto the skin track on Lower Turnpike and out of the wind though, the actual snow accumulations became apparent.  Indeed I’d say that the 4 inches reported was a safe way to go in terms of being conservative, but aside from scoured areas, that definitely represented the low end of accumulations I encountered.  Omitting the extremes of drifts and scoured areas, my depth checks revealed settled snow depths of 4 to 10 inches throughout my tour.  That wasn’t really elevation dependent, it seemed to just be a factor of how the snow sifted down in various areas.  Drifts I found up around the 3,000’ elevation were generally in the 2 to 3-foot range, though there were some bigger ones as well of course – I got a shot of one neat example in my images below.

Anyway, the skiing was obviously much different than what you would get from just four inches of fluff.  With a number like that I’d be expecting to get good turns on only low angle terrain, but bottomless turns were pretty standard all the way up to about single black diamond pitch as long as the subsurface was smooth.  I was on my 115 mm boards, but one could certainly still float on a lot less.  I’d say the storm must have put down a half inch of liquid or so on the mountain based on what I was skiing.

Accumulations really tapered off as I headed west out of the mountains, with just a bit of accumulation in the Richmond Village area and it seems like just a trace to nil in the Burlington area.

A few images from today:

[wxeyeNH]

Hi J Spin.  Nice post and pictures. Your posts are so informative and I enjoy reading them.  I asked you this question a long time ago, but for some reason your posts are the only ones on the boards that are small and the lines are spaced so tightly its hard for me to read.  Is it just my browser or do other people on NNE weather seem the same thing?  Does anyone know if there is a setting on AMWX weather that is a default to make posts of different font sizes or spacings? 

In any event thanks for posting and being a great contributor.

Gene

[wxmanmitch]

Had about 2" from the upslope last night. It was a dry, but a dense and graupel ridden snow. There's about a 12-13" glacier under the 2" or so of upslope on top.

48.3" for the season so far. 

[dendrite]

3 hours ago, wxeyeNH said:

Hi J Spin.  Nice post and pictures. Your posts are so informative and I enjoy reading them.  I asked you this question a long time ago, but for some reason your posts are the only ones on the boards that are small and the lines are spaced so tightly its hard for me to read.  Is it just my browser or do other people on NNE weather seem the same thing?  Does anyone know if there is a setting on AMWX weather that is a default to make posts of different font sizes or spacings? 

In any event thanks for posting and being a great contributor.

Gene

I think he toggles his posting "source" to HTML and just pastes the code in.

[alex]

Another 1.5" overnight bringing the total to 7.5". Sun is out, 2.3F

[wxeyeNH]

2 hours ago, alex said:

Another 1.5" overnight bringing the total to 7.5". Sun is out, 2.3F

Alex,   Just looked at your cam.  So much frickin snow.   Down here the flurries went all day and most of last evening.  After about 24 hours of flurries I don't have a dusting to snow from it.  Just the snow from the birch bomb.  Your going to have slush city up there and in much of NNE come Friday/Saturday.  The snow down here is cement and the deer are having an awful time digging through it for soem nibbles of grass.  Personally I would not mind a complete melt and a start over after a week or so.

[J.Spin]

14 hours ago, wxeyeNH said:

Hi J Spin.  Nice post and pictures. Your posts are so informative and I enjoy reading them.  I asked you this question a long time ago, but for some reason your posts are the only ones on the boards that are small and the lines are spaced so tightly its hard for me to read.  Is it just my browser or do other people on NNE weather seem the same thing?  Does anyone know if there is a setting on AMWX weather that is a default to make posts of different font sizes or spacings? 

In any event thanks for posting and being a great contributor.

Gene

 

11 hours ago, dendrite said:

I think he toggles his posting "source" to HTML and just pastes the code in.

It’s actually just as NoPoles noted (not sure where that very pertinent post went, but it was here right in the thread earlier, just a bit after Gene’s inquiry).  My text is often used in multiple places (posts here, posts to my personal web page, incorporation into my winter weather summaries, posts in other forums, etc.) so I never create anything in the forum editor.  I write, and save, all my text offline (typically in Microsoft Word unless there’s a specific reason to use another application) and then paste it in where it’s needed, with modifications as required for the specific environment.

I’m surprised more people don’t go that route, because if there’s one thing I’ve learned after years of posting in various online environments, it’s that you can’t trust any of it.  The online text editors can fail on you at any moment, or the entire website can simply be taken offline forever, and all that data is gone.  For example, most people around here know how easy it is to get things off the EasternUSwx.com forums now.  The biggest issue is definitely writing in the online text editors though, it probably took me about one experience of writing up some substantial text only to have it disappear into the ether to know that I was never doing that again. 

It’s interesting, because Gene has brought this up a number of times and we’ve discussed it, and I thought the general consensus was that it was an issue specific to Gene’s display?  The problem is that the forum software seems to change every few months with upgrades, and the text editor and display sometimes change with it.  I use only the default settings in the forum, so each time things change, I specifically adjust my input text to make it come out the same size as the other text I’m seeing.  For example, right now my input text is 10 ½-point Arial, which I specifically chose because the output I see in the forum has text roughly the same size as what I see from other people.  If I go up to even 11-point font (at least as of my last test) the text becomes awkwardly large.  I go with what shows up on my end because I use the default settings and assume that would be the most common for everyone else.  The only thing I see differently on my end is that my text isn’t multi-spaced (I prefer that because the excessive spacing really takes up a lot of space in longer posts).  Here are some examples of what I see.  The first one is what I see for my most common environment (my laptop in Internet Explorer, with me signed into the forum).  The second is what I see signed in on my phone, and the third is another look I took where I’m not signed in and viewing on laptop via Chrome browser.  All the text is basically the same size on my end via multiple platforms and browsers, so I haven’t wanted to fiddle with the format yet, but I guess others can provide input as well.

[wxeyeNH]

Thanks J Spin for your detailed reply.  Part of the problem is that I really should be wearing reading glasses and get lazy so I squint through the posts many times.  This is what happens at 62 years old.  Now I totally understand why it happens and it makes sense what you do.  

This will get me off the couch and grab the glasses more often.

Again, thanks!

[mreaves]

The dreaded flood watch has been issued.