Silverton was no fluke

Sunday morning we are roaming the SNOTEL sites looking for Big Snow. The "Upper San Juan" site in SW Colorado caught our eye. This site is actually Wolf Creek Pass on US Highway 160 NE of Pagosa Springs. It actually is the very tippy top of the San Juan River headwaters. River runners get giddy & goofy when Wolf Creek has a lot of snow--it's means "The Juan" will be a hot ticket during upcoming runoff. Well, back to the story: This SNOTEL is sitting this morning at 81.7 inches of snow. Yesterday was 87.9. That's considered normal settling in deep snow. The interesting factoid is that the site gained 36.4 inches of snow in five days! That translates to a gain of 7.1 inches of SWE, AKA Snow Water Equivalent. SWE is the real water that's hiding in the snow.

We had a question recently on how to find this data yourself. It's pretty easy. Click on the top link at left--the one for SNOTEL Sites. On the right side of the new page you will see a link Snow Depth called "Products." When you click there, you can get a text summary of the snowdepth at all sites within any given state. After you find a particular site of interest, return to the main SNOTEL page, click that state, choose the site that caught your attention and then click on "7 Day Snow Depth" by either hour or day. It's really quite simple once you get the hang of it.

One other cool thing you can do is find the SNOTEL site on a satellite, terrain or highway map using Google Maps. Each SNOTEL site has long-lats. Plug them into the Google maps search field and, viola, there you have it! Click the example below for a larger version.