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Winter 2020 New England Banter and General Obs


CapturedNature
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High of 31F up here with overcast and occasional flurries today in town and some snow showers on the hill.

EURO and other models argue for some light snow accumulation tonight into tomorrow morning... 0.3” at Mansfield would be nice.

I’ll keep you all posted on whether it’s 0.9” or 1.7” at home :lol:.  Maybe a good car shot from the parking lot with 2-3” of fairy dust at the Mtn.  

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3 hours ago, MetHerb said:

That's why I'm OK with the 3-4" of sleet I received.  That will take a lot more to melt than plain snow would.

I always kinda based that on water equiv. Basically 10” of 10:1 snow will eventually glaciate its way down to the equivalent of 3” of 3:1 sleet. Both would have the same 1.00” water equiv. It’s not a perfect relationship, but that’s always been my rough estimate.

So 15” of snow should have more staying power than 3” sleet. There are some caveats though as fresh fluff has more exposed surface area so it can sublimate more quickly than solid ice can.

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Fluff is overrated unless you are skiing. For pack and overall impressiveness, meh. It’s cool if it falls gently and stacks. That’s when it tends to fall and slide off objects making it almost deeper than it appears. But hours later, it’s already suffering from shrinkage. I’d take 10” of paste over 15” of powder any day. There’s also something impressive about heavy wet snow stuck to trees and seemingly doubling the diameter of the limbs. 

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12 minutes ago, CoastalWx said:

Fluff is overrated unless you are skiing. For pack and overall impressiveness, meh. It’s cool if it falls gently and stacks. That’s when it tends to fall and slide off objects making it almost deeper than it appears. But hours later, it’s already suffering from shrinkage. I’d take 10” of paste over 15” of powder any day. There’s also something impressive about heavy wet snow stuck to trees and seemingly doubling the diameter of the limbs. 

No doubt, I would too...we had some big pasting going on last November.  Great for the scenery and base.  

I do think most events come down to LE anyway when it comes to staying power...but all else has to be equal.  

For skiing and even NNE vibe, the drier snow mixed with more consistent cold seems to work.  

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13 minutes ago, CoastalWx said:

Fluff is overrated unless you are skiing. For pack and overall impressiveness, meh. It’s cool if it falls gently and stacks. That’s when it tends to fall and slide off objects making it almost deeper than it appears. But hours later, it’s already suffering from shrinkage. I’d take 10” of paste over 15” of powder any day. There’s also something impressive about heavy wet snow stuck to trees and seemingly doubling the diameter of the limbs. 

Shaking you so hard with violence agreeing

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9 minutes ago, CoastalWx said:

Fluff is overrated unless you are skiing. For pack and overall impressiveness, meh. It’s cool if it falls gently and stacks. That’s when it tends to fall and slide off objects making it almost deeper than it appears. But hours later, it’s already suffering from shrinkage. I’d take 10” of paste over 15” of powder any day. There’s also something impressive about heavy wet snow stuck to trees and seemingly doubling the diameter of the limbs. 

I don't get a lot of paste outside of the bookend portions of the season, but I get plenty of dense powder from all of the SWFEs. I kinda like that type of snow...it gives the feeling of powder, but it doesn't get cut in half 12hrs later nor sublimate away after the first glimpse of a BINOVC. For infrastructure effects, really it's just SWE that matters. I always laugh when a place near BUF gets like 50" of LES and within a few days the pack is like 6". Once the plows toss it to the side, 30" of 30:1 LES looks the same as 10" of 10:1 in the snowbanks and it doesn't take any more force for the plows to push it.

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They should keep a stat for liquid equivalent in the form of snow/sleet. Basically the monthly precipitation with the RA and ZR filtered out. I know in the climo data of yore a lot of weenies separated the two out like that, but most just labeled any snowfall as 10:1. So you got a lot of 5" / 0.50" garbage.

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3 minutes ago, dendrite said:

I don't get a lot of paste outside of the bookend portions of the season, but I get plenty of dense powder from all of the SWFEs. I kinda like that type of snow...it gives the feeling of powder, but it doesn't get cut in half 12hrs later nor sublimate away after the first glimpse of a BINOVC. For infrastructure effects, really it's just SWE that matters. I always laugh when a place near BUF gets like 50" of LES and within a few days the pack is like 6". Once the plows toss it to the side, 30" of 30:1 LES looks the same as 10" of 10:1 in the snowbanks and it doesn't take any more force for the plows to push it.

I feel like over the last few years we've gotten more of that SWFE type density up here than we had in the past...absolutely no empirical data to back that up though.

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1 hour ago, powderfreak said:

I bet it happens quite a bit early season after suppressed storms... but pretty cool so many folks are getting to experience snow depths higher than the mountain snow belts.

I doubt it. Early season snow melts quickly off mountain  and this was the most snow so early and by far the most so early in Dec.

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10 hours ago, Ginx snewx said:

I doubt it. Early season snow melts quickly off mountain  and this was the most snow so early and by far the most so early in Dec.

Yeah it melts quickly off mountain but you’ll get scattered days here and there.  October 2011 definitely, there was a couple November storms where it’s happened recently.  Not last year of course but there was a storm a few Nov ago that crushed Hubby and Dendrite with heavy wet snow leaving them with more than the summit.  

It does happen early season...might only be a couple days of it before it melts down low and the summit passes back up. 

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