NNE Warm Season Thread 2021

[J.Spin]

10 hours ago, powderfreak said:

The days of snow per season holds some pretty serious weight in terms of "wintry appeal" of a given winter.  To me, having flakes flying is important mostly because it usually leads to a fresh looking surface.  There are deeper snowpacks, more inches, but I absolutely love having a sparkling looking top sheet of snow.  When you get even 0.2-0.4" of sparkling dust or even synoptic snow, the surface looks fresh.  "Looks" is the key word.  You can look out the window and see the existing snow sparking or having this undisturbed look.  It appears like it all could've fallen overnight.  There's no crusty, glazed, or brown snowpack. 

Even a couple tenths is enough to hide the dirty old snow.  Get a thaw that melts it down to crust but passing snow showers on the back-end leave even 0.6" of new snow on top... it just looks a lot better than a dry air freeze.  You can't see the crust so the pack looks the same as if it just fell when looking out over the yard. The winters with "days of snowflakes" can feel the most mystical... like it's just always snowing.  Fluffy flakes floating down out of passing clouds in a cold air mass.  It's a very wintry vibe.  The metric of "days with snow" definitely influence the overall "vibe" of a winter.

The Northern Greens certainly seem to excel in the ability to put at least some flakes in the air throughout the winter.  I haven’t really looked at that stat for other sites in the region or in the country, so I don’t know what’s typical, but 100+ days with snowfall certainly feels snowy.  There are presumably sites in closer proximity to the lakes that get even more days with snow.

I’d argue that many days with snow is a solid benefit when it comes to areas where winter tourism is important, since it at least improves the winter aesthetics for the visitors as you’ve noted.  Thankfully, the flakes can be more than just window dressing and produce accumulations substantial enough to improve the surfaces on the slopes as well.  If I check my data from last season for days with ≥½” of snow, which typically correlates with ≥1” of snow at the local resorts, that’s still 64 days.

I should be able to do the monthly breakdown on days with snowfall, so we can look at that as well and see how last season stacked up.  With 117 days of snow, it’s already up there at the top of the charts for the data set here, and I seem to recall we had a month this past season with just a couple of days where it didn’t snow.

[J.Spin]

23 minutes ago, tamarack said:

Thanks to zero upslope and less overall snow, we're way lower than the above.
             Avg.  Med.    Hi/Lo
Trace    67.5   72.0    79/48
0.1"+     41.8   42.0    55/27
1.0"+     21.7   22.0    32/13
4.0"+      7.4     7.0     14/3
6.0"+      4.0    4.0       9/0

That’s good info, since as I mentioned, I don’t really have a sense for what numbers are like at sites around the region.  Total snowfall numbers are always flying around, but days with snow isn’t talked about as much.

I did the count for 0.5”+ from last season for my previous post, but I haven’t calculated all those thresholds yet.  That’s an analysis I can certainly put on my “to do” list when I have time.  I have it set up to run via COUNTIF in Excel, and with the CoCoRaHS data, it’s quick.

There are of course a million different ways to analyze snow data (many that you and others here in the forum have shown me that I never would have thought about).  What I find especially interesting about looking at the different parameters is discovering aspects of seasons that would never have been obvious.  Who would have thought that the much-maligned, average-at-best 2020-2021 snow season would come out tops in our data set for days with snow?  - not me.  Nevertheless, that’s the type of interesting info that the analyses reveal.

[alex]

4 hours ago, J.Spin said:

The Northern Greens certainly seem to excel in the ability to put at least some flakes in the air throughout the winter.  I haven’t really looked at that stat for other sites in the region or in the country, so I don’t know what’s typical, but 100+ days with snowfall certainly feels snowy.  There are presumably sites in closer proximity to the lakes that get even more days with snow.

I’d argue that many days with snow is a solid benefit when it comes to areas where winter tourism is important, since it at least improves the winter aesthetics for the visitors as you’ve noted.  Thankfully, the flakes can be more than just window dressing and produce accumulations substantial enough to improve the surfaces on the slopes as well.  If I check my data from last season for days with ≥½” of snow, which typically correlates with ≥1” of snow at the local resorts, that’s still 64 days.

I should be able to do the monthly breakdown on days with snowfall, so we can look at that as well and see how last season stacked up.  With 117 days of snow, it’s already up there at the top of the charts for the data set here, and I seem to recall we had a month this past season with just a couple of days where it didn’t snow.

Totally agree from the tourism perspective. 6” on the ground with flakes in the air and snow covered trees feels a lot better to most tourists than 12” of icy crust

[mreaves]

Yikes. Local news just bullseyed us for 3” of rain Saturday through Sunday. Looks like all outdoor activities will need to be done by Saturday afternoon. 

[mreaves]

.26” so far. Heading up to Williston and it looks like it hasn’t rained much past Montpelier.  

[Patriot21]

3 hours ago, mreaves said:

.26” so far. Heading up to Williston and it looks like it hasn’t rained much past Montpelier.  

I was up that way earlier myself and saw some breaks of sun, was raining quite good here when I left

[powderfreak]

6 hours ago, mreaves said:

.26” so far. Heading up to Williston and it looks like it hasn’t rained much past Montpelier.  

Didn't get any real rain today.  Maybe a couple hundredths?  Had one brief shower while hiking right after this photo... looking due south, a shower moving in from the west (right to left).  Was barely enough to wet the ground up at 3,600ft, might not have even reached the ground at 1,500ft or lower aside from a random sprinkle.

[backedgeapproaching]

Hope this holds for next weekend. Dews in 40s or even low 50s seem unattainable this summer. Anything below 60F will be nice.

[dendrite]

28 minutes ago, backedgeapproaching said:

Hope this holds for next weekend. Dews in 40s or even low 50s seem unattainable this summer. Anything below 60F will be nice.

We had a nice stretch of chilly mins the end of June.

[backedgeapproaching]

3 minutes ago, dendrite said:

We had a nice stretch of chilly mins the end of June.

Yea, your right. Looks like I had 7 or 8 days of lows in 40s in June. Been pretty muggy since about the 25th.  Those June nights feel like ages ago.

[klw]

10 hours ago, powderfreak said:

Didn't get any real rain today.  Maybe a couple hundredths?  Had one brief shower while hiking right after this photo... looking due south, a shower moving in from the west (right to left).  Was barely enough to wet the ground up at 3,600ft, might not have even reached the ground at 1,500ft or lower aside from a random sprinkle.

Whereas we had an inch during the day and another inch since midnight.

[tamarack]

8 hours ago, dendrite said:

We had a nice stretch of chilly mins the end of June.

Made me scratch my head, as 27-30 minima were anything but chilly.  Then I checked the numbers and 23-25 had cool mornings, including 37° on the 24th, lowest for the month.

Had 0.23" at 7 AM as rain began sometime after 2.  Currently steady light rain, as the stratiform precip continues to dominate here this warm season.

[J.Spin]

Knowing the average number of days with snow at our site, I next looked at the monthly breakdown of days with snow.  I actually had no idea how the data were going to distribute, but the appearance is certainly that of a unimodal distribution with a peak in January.  It does look like there’s a bit of a skew of the peak to the left, but of course, we’re looking at a very coarse interval of months, and the eight months that happen to cover the snowfall season won’t necessarily correspond perfectly to Mother Nature’s actual snowfall season.  We certainly have those years where it feels like January is relatively dry due to artic intrusions, so I could have easily seen some sort of bimodal distribution where January came in below December and February for days with snow, but that’s clearly not the case.

[radarman]

8 hours ago, J.Spin said:

 It does look like there’s a bit of a skew of the peak to the left

If you calculated these as a percentage of month days with snow I think Feb passes Dec, but Jan is still the peak.

[tamarack]

23 hours ago, J.Spin said:

Knowing the average number of days with snow at our site, I next looked at the monthly breakdown of days with snow.  I actually had no idea how the data were going to distribute, but the appearance is certainly that of a unimodal distribution with a peak in January.  It does look like there’s a bit of a skew of the peak to the left, but of course, we’re looking at a very coarse interval of months, and the eight months that happen to cover the snowfall season won’t necessarily correspond perfectly to Mother Nature’s actual snowfall season.  We certainly have those years where it feels like January is relatively dry due to artic intrusions, so I could have easily seen some sort of bimodal distribution where January came in below December and February for days with snow, but that’s clearly not the case.

Month   T     0.1+
OCT      1.6   0.6
NOV      7.1    3.4
DEC     14.1   9.0
JAN     15.0   9.7
FEB     13.1    9.7
MAR    11.4    7.1
APR      5.5    2.8
MAY      0.4   0.1
The "T" numbers are pretty close to 70% of yours throughout (except for May), while Feb is clearly tops here for 0.1"+.  (For 1"+ Feb leads Jan 5.7 to 5.0, and for calendar days with 10"+ March is slightly above Feb.)  

[Patriot21]

I flipped over an empty bucket outside on Saturday morning and have 3.25" in it right now, not sure how accurate that is but we did get a lot of rain

[J.Spin]

On 7/18/2021 at 5:19 PM, radarman said:

If you calculated these as a percentage of month days with snow I think Feb passes Dec, but Jan is still the peak.

Agreed, and that’s a good point - when one is using months for their intervals, they’re roughly equivalent spans of time, but not exactly the same.

It would take a bit of work to get all the dates for days with snowfall from every season into the appropriate format to plot the distribution and find the actual midpoint for that parameter.  While it might be interesting to know the midpoint of the season based on days with snowfall, a more practical measurement that I do have is the midpoint of the season based on cumulative snowfall.  That point isn’t the middle of January, and it’s not the last day of January either – it January 25^th (plot below).  I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s pretty close to the midpoint that would be obtained from looking at snowfall days as well.  With that date being the midpoint of the snowfall season for our location, we really shouldn’t get a single month serving as a symmetrical peak for the days with snowfall plot, and we also shouldn’t see January and February sharing the peak equally – the plot with those eight months would probably have its peak skewed a bit toward January.

[dmcginvt]

Man to be a hiker who hasn't made it to shelter at Mt Ellen or Mansfield!!  That cell over sugarbush is the real thing.

[mreaves]

1 hour ago, dmcginvt said:

Man to be a hiker who hasn't made it to shelter at Mt Ellen or Mansfield!!  That cell over sugarbush is the real thing.

We were golfing in Northfield and could tell it was pretty strong two ridges west.  We finished up just as it was starting to rumble. It seemed to thunder for a couple of minutes straight at a time. 

[#NoPoles]

Bow echo incoming

[powderfreak]

0.52” in the Stratus from the thunderstorm earlier… might have added a couple hundredths in sprinkles and drizzle afterward.

MVL ASOS looks like 1.08” so they got into some good rain rates just north of here on RT 100.

[mreaves]

21 minutes ago, powderfreak said:

0.52” in the Stratus from the thunderstorm earlier… might have added a couple hundredths in sprinkles and drizzle afterward.

MVL ASOS looks like 1.08” so they got into some good rain rates just north of here on RT 100.

.67 here. Nice thunder and lightning but no wind to speak of. 

[tamarack]

20 hours ago, J.Spin said:

Agreed, and that’s a good point - when one is using months for their intervals, they’re roughly equivalent spans of time, but not exactly the same.

It would take a bit of work to get all the dates for days with snowfall from every season into the appropriate format to plot the distribution and find the actual midpoint for that parameter.  While it might be interesting to know the midpoint of the season based on days with snowfall, a more practical measurement that I do have is the midpoint of the season based on cumulative snowfall.  That point isn’t the middle of January, and it’s not the last day of January either – it January 25^th (plot below).  I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s pretty close to the midpoint that would be obtained from looking at snowfall days as well.  With that date being the midpoint of the snowfall season for our location, we really shouldn’t get a single month serving as a symmetrical peak for the days with snowfall plot, and we also shouldn’t see January and February sharing the peak equally – the plot with those eight months would probably have its peak skewed a bit toward January.

A bit later here.  Using the raw 23-year data, Feb. 1 is closest at 50.1% of average, while doing the same 15-day smoothing I use for temps, Jan. 31 is 49.9% while Feb. 1 is 50.8%.  For convenience, I've used the Jan-Feb bridge as the midpoint for snow.  The midpoint for HDDs comes earlier; Jan. 21 is both the average and median date.  It has ranged from Jan. 13 in the warm late winter/spring of 2010 to Jan. 28 when record mild Nov-Dec-early-Jan turned abruptly cold and snowy in mid-Jan.

[tamarack]

The NY/VT tiger was a tiny kitty when it reached here about 2 AM - 0.04".

[wxeyeNH]

Best thunderstorm in a couple of years last evening.  1.07".  Some small hail.  Gusty winds and lots of lightning.  One thing that I found interesting.  Thunder was not loud.  Wonder if smoke had to do with that?

7.25" ish for the month

[dendrite]

1 hour ago, wxeyeNH said:

Best thunderstorm in a couple of years last evening.  1.07".  Some small hail.  Gusty winds and lots of lightning.  One thing that I found interesting.  Thunder was not loud.  Wonder if smoke had to do with that?

7.25" ish for the month

Ironically the thunder was really loud here despite distant strikes. Big house shakers. Maybe I literally stole your thunder.

[tamarack]

6 hours ago, tamarack said:

The NY/VT tiger was a tiny kitty when it reached here about 2 AM - 0.04".

Finally had a TS this month, tying 2 other Julys for latest thunder, though it did the usual sideslip - to the south this time.  Considerable thunder, none closer than 3-4 miles (rough estimate as none was near enough to detect the flicker) and another 0.04", putting this month at exactly the same 3.89" as 7/09 thru the 21st.  Had another 3.40" in the rest of the month back then; nothing indicates we'd get even close to that now.  (Some drops falling presently (3:45) so we may finish the day ahead of 2009.)

[tamarack]

The side-slipper is now warned - saw a 60 dbz pixel just west of WVL.  May have a 2nd chance as radar indicates RA+ in Farmington.

2nd bite at the apple was less noisy (same distance from strikes but less of them) but lots wetter - 15 minutes of RA+ probably dumped 3/10" though I'm not wading thru the wet grass to find out (until my 9 PM obs time.)

[powderfreak]

Finally a cool night.  The past several rainy days have had some lingering humidity... like low to mid 60s.  Tonight it's already down in the mid-50s at 10:30pm.  55F here adjacent to the Stowe Country Club.

Windows and doors open and it's chilly but much welcomed.  10pm temps are 53-60F in the local area between west and east side communities.  The real nerd in me loves that the wind barbs come off the higher terrain as cold air drainage occurs from higher elevations downward.

 

[tamarack]

17 hours ago, tamarack said:

The side-slipper is now warned - saw a 60 dbz pixel just west of WVL.  May have a 2nd chance as radar indicates RA+ in Farmington.

2nd bite at the apple was less noisy (same distance from strikes but less of them) but lots wetter - 15 minutes of RA+ probably dumped 3/10" though I'm not wading thru the wet grass to find out (until my 9 PM obs time.)

2nd, quieter, TS brought 0.26".