The explosive start of the 2007/2008 season didn't happen this year. Still,
December brought over two feet of snow in 9 days with snowy weather, with most
falling between the 19th and 21st, but most melted just after Christmas.
January brought two and a half feet with three storms over 6". For the season
to date this was more snow than many years. Southern New England saw more
snow than in all of last year. There was no January thaw, the high for the
month was just 38 and the dew point never went above freezing. There was
plenty of cold, the low of -17 was the lowest I've record (by 4 degrees) in my
five years of records. February had near average temperatures, but much
less snow than average, just under a foot. Still, the minimum snow on the
ground was never less than a foot and the SDDs for the month exceeded the
seasonal total for half the years in my record.
Daily/Monthly Data
The following table summarizes the snow fall and depth days from sites
that are posting that data on local weather observations mail lists
and a couple others. If people also prepare Web pages for daily
information for their site, I'll include links to them. Cells under
the "snow" column are the snowfall for the site in that month, under
"SDD" are the depth days for the month.
Jim Corbin, a meteorologist from Rhode Island, proposed the concept of both
snow depth days and the persistence quotient, but he didn't have good names
for them. After a bouncing around various ideas, I came up with Depth
Days. It seems to fit into colloquial speech well, e.g. "When mired
in the Depth Days of February, she thought fondly of the Dog Days of
August." Of course, none of us snow lovers would ever think that. I picked
Persistence Quotient while putting this page together, we'll see how it wears
with time.
Musings
I think depth days is a great statistic, and I'm surprised that it is catching
on slowly outside of the NE Weather Spotters mail list. I never expected that the NWS
would embrace it quickly, but I had hoped that TV meteorologists would start
using it, in monthly summaries, if nothing else. It would be nice if ski
areas would use it, but they may not wish to if they are not likely to be #1
consistantly. (And if only one area reports depth days, it would not be a
good comparative statistic.) The University of Vermont has graphs of snow depths
at Stowe through many seasons.
