IEM Daily Feature
Thursday, 18 February 2010

How long will this take?

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 06:10 AM

The featured chart plots the number of days it takes for a given snowfall depth to disappear. The depth is the maximum reported value during a period of snow cover. Rephrasing, how long does it take to get rid of the snow once we reach a local maximum of depth. If you hope that our last snowfall peaked our snow depth around 15 inches here in Ames, the chart would hint that perhaps we have another 30 days left before the snow disappears. Not good news. The dataset is separated by time of year and you can see the spring events (March-May) have a very short duration, which makes sense as temperatures are warming and solar angle increasing.

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Tags:   snowcover