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NNE Cold Season Thread


wxeyeNH
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3 minutes ago, alex said:

Focus on today, Diane. B)

LOL, good attitude!

And if you have to focus on a warm system, you can always think about the positive contribution of all that liquid and liquid equivalent going in to enhance the snowpack.  You’re in snow country now, so you’ve got to get into that NNE state of mind.

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24 minutes ago, J.Spin said:

LOL, good attitude!

And if you have to focus on a warm system, you can always think about the positive contribution of all that liquid and liquid equivalent going in to enhance the snowpack.  You’re in snow country now, so you’ve got to get into that NNE state of mind.

I used to get that anxiety as well. I think part of it is related to having lived in SNE, where building a true snowpack is challenging and seeing a snowpack getting hammered by rain is heartbreaking. Up here, most of the time a week after a major cutter your snowpack is building back up, trees are covered, and you pretty much forget about it. 

As a skier, your point about liquid also matters - especially for those of us who love the glades. Of course, significant cutters can do a lot of damage (I fully expect our glades to close after this weekend), but that too is part of life. Even if they close, chances are they will be back open quite soon

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1 minute ago, alex said:

I used to get that anxiety as well. I think part of it is related to having lived in SNE, where building a true snowpack is challenging and seeing a snowpack getting hammered by rain is heartbreaking. Up here, most of the time a week after a major cutter your snowpack is building back up, trees are covered, and you pretty much forget about it. 

As a skier, your point about liquid also matters - especially for those of us who love the glades. Of course, significant cutters can do a lot of damage (I fully expect our glades to close after this weekend), but that too is part of life. Even if they close, chances are they will be back open quite soon

Yeah, I can imagine it would be tough to have warm systems come through and melt out the snow, and not really have any idea when it’s going to come back for places that are heavily dependent on mostly synoptic systems.  You’re essentially gambling with the pattern all season.  It’s not that bad patterns don’t affect us up in the mountains of NNE, but in an overall sense one just had to look at the snowfall and snowpack averages and that gives you an idea of how often the dice are going to give you something decent.

Indeed, the off piste often closes with these systems, and sometimes its due to coverage, but a lot of times it’s simply due to the surface conditions being hard/dangerous.  Sometimes you get backside snows and you can almost skip that altogether, and sometimes you just have to wait for the next couple of systems to put down a bit more to soften things up and make them safe.

Not every warm/mixed system results in a net gain for the snowpack of course, it depends on the system and the state of the density/moisture of the snowpack going into it, but plenty of messy storms actually do result in bolstering the snowpack.  Of course we’d prefer the systems to be all snow because that essentially guarantees a net gain, but in whatever form, we do need some of this synoptic moisture (especially this far to the northwest) to build the pack.  Our everyday modest systems are nice and can help in that regard, and they are certainly part of what makes our surface conditions so good, but without the bigger events at times, the pack would be rather meager.

When time permits, I like to monitor the SWE in the snowpack for these more notable warm/mixed events because you can get a sense of whether the event was a net negative, neutral, positive, etc.  I don’t know how this next one is going to go around here, but the analysis is informative, and typically I know the mountains will do substantially better than we do in the valley.

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As I await the fropa and snow squalls I'll post this picture.

So many frickin deer in our apple orchard last night.  Bucks and does.    I can see a dozen or more yarding up in the woods right now.  We had a bumper crop of apples but they are now  about gone.  Lots of working digging through the 5-8" of that sleet/freezing rain/snow combo from last week .  

Here is a picture of the activity from the past 24 hours.  The 3.75" of snow from two days ago had covered the old tracks so this is from last night.  I know you are not suppose to feed deer any food and I don't anymore but since they all yard up behind the house I figure that I might buy some deer apples and scatter them around each day. That is what they have been eating the past couple of months so it's not changing their metabolism.   They are smart and know the south facing slope will always have less snow and be the first to melt off so they stick around the house each winter.  Wonder if this weekends warmth will be enough to melt some bare spots?  Probably not since this snow has so much water content and is very durable. 

DEER.jpg

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Just updated the snow total - pretty amazing how close  @J.Spin  and I always seem to be; sometimes he's up by an inch, sometimes I'm up by an inch. For an area where microclimates make such a difference, I feel that the fact that we are so close in outcome while being 60 miles or so away (not sure how accurate that is) should be pretty remarkable. 

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Getting dark to the west.   Always interesting to see what makes it over the mountains.

 

Meanwhile,  it looks like quite the icestorm potential later this weekend for someone.  Will it be S Quebec or NNE?   Seems these ice storm products are always over done but even 1/2 of these amounts would cause big problems.

 

ICE.jpg

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1 minute ago, wxeyeNH said:

Getting dark to the west.   Always interesting to see what makes it over the mountains.

 

Meanwhile,  it looks like quite the icestorm potential later this weekend for someone.  Will it be S Quebec or NNE?   Seems these ice storm products are always over done but even 1/2 of these amounts would cause big problems.

 

ICE.jpg

Glad to be in the sucker hole for that one :)

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1 hour ago, powderfreak said:

I'm hearing reports of thunder in BTV with that squall.

Ahh, that’s interesting – I thought I heard a roll of thunder that lasted a few seconds, but figured it was one of the trucks down by the loading dock.  On hearing this though, I suspect it was indeed thunder from thundersnow.

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23 minutes ago, powderfreak said:

Nice J.Spin! 

I had about 4.25" from the event total (early morning and this afternoon)... depth at 9"

You definitely looked to take the brunt of that squall.  Looked like the core went right down I-89.

Yeah, we certainly hit the 3 to 5” that was in the forecast.  It was a good shot of liquid as well at roughly a third of an inch – that will certainly help to bolster the snowpack.

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There wasn’t much on the radar aside from that streamer up near St. Albans, so I didn’t think we’d be seeing anything notable in the near future with respect to snowfall.  Sort of suddenly though, that area of snowfall just decided to form up against the spine, so we’ve got some decent light snow coming down again.

08JAN20C.gif

Like PF said in the other thread, this mesoscale snow that sort of comes out of nowhere like that and isn’t modeled exactly is a nice component to have as part of the winter snowfall.

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Event totals: 5.7” Snow/0.34” L.E.

 

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

New Snow: 0.4 inches

New Liquid: 0.02 inches

Snow/Water Ratio: 20.0

Snow Density: 5.0% H2O

Temperature: 6.3 F

Sky: Mostly Cloudy

Snow at the stake: 10.0 inches

 

This event finished off with a final 0.4” of snow last night.  To this point at our site it's been the largest storm of the month and the third largest storm of the season.

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