Snow Depth Days
of the Northeast: 2018-2019

The season in review

Welcome to the new snow season. A hot summer and late start to foliage season, things turned cool and we didn't have any decent Indian Summer days, at least none with gorgeously clear and frost Canadian air and brilliant sun all day.

November and a "Modoki" El Niño brought a series of storms across the country and several snow events. Penacook saw measurable snow on some eight calandar days and a very cold Thanksgiving. Concord's record high temperature that day was 25°F, and that was broken by some 8°! Unfortunately, the KCON ASOS station failed the day before (probably by the cold) It appears that the NWS has backfilled some of the missing data from other sources.

December brought warm and dry weather, apparently that happens in Modoki El Ninos too. I had only 1.8" of snow and bare ground for most of the month. January started with a little snow, then a little more a couple days later. I nearly recorded no cover on the 9th, but we got a couple inches of snow then cold weather and that preserved cover until more snow, then rain, and then more snow reached perhaps the deepest snow cover of the season (8.5").

February brought a week of very little snow cover (it was mostly ice), then a snow to sleet event added an impenetrable layer, and a few small events covered things with a bit of real snow.

At the end of the month I packed the house and moved out, the last major event of divorce proceedings and interrupting the Penacook data stream for the rest of the season. Next year I'll be reporting from Sutton NH.

March was a fairly quiet month, but I still had a fair amount of snow on moving day. April and May were wet, with rain that changed to snow on April 9th.

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.

Location October November December January February March April May
Snow SDD Snow SDD Snow SDD Snow SDD Snow SDD Snow SDD Snow SDD Snow SDD
Fairhaven MA 3.5 4 0.3 0 1.5 1 6.8 12 7.8 24
Pepperell MA 13.5 47 0.6 0 11.9 29 13.6 73 11.2 90 0.1 0
Bow NH 18.8 78 4 26 18.2 143 14.7 251 11.2 373 0.5 7
Bristol NH 0.5 0 22.8 95.4 3.2 121.5 29.4 248.5 15.2 375.5 10.9 296.5 1.7 1.8
Penacook NH 12.2 56 1.8 7 17 96.5
Mt. Mansfield VT 6 17 52 478 5 1346 46 2150 23 2733 34 3460 15 3019 0 1389 0 44

2018-2019 season to end of last month

The persistence quotient is lower than the ultimate value if there is still snow on the ground at the site. This data will be updated each month.

Location Snowfall Depth Days Persistence
Quotient
Fairhaven MA 19.9 41 2.1
Pepperell MA 50.9 239 4.7
Bow NH 67.4 878 13.0
Bristol NH 83.7 1139.2 13.6
Penacook NH 31 159.5 5.1
Mt. Mansfield VT 181 14636 80.9

Contributors

Name Location
Dennis Bollea Fairhaven MA
Steve Gunn Bristol NH
Jim Hilt Bow NH
Paul Venditti Pepperell MA
Ric Werme Penacook NH

Credits

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.

Last update: 2025 March 8
Ric Werme

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