The following table summarizes the snow fall and depth days from sites
that posted that data on the old wxobs-sne
mailing list. 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 wxobs-sne 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.) I see that UVM has graphs of snow depths
at Stowe through many seasons.
