Snow Depth Days
of the Northeast: 2021-2022

The season in review

Welcome to the 2021/2022 snow season. In November, parts of New Hampshire saw a little snow in a few events. More interesting is that November was quite a bit sunnier than usual, and that led to a few unusually warm days and cold nights. No temperature records were threatened, and the average temperature wound up very close to what climatology expects. December brought some snow, but also warm weather and I wound up with only three days that had more than 3" snow cover.

Then January. Not a huge amount of snow for observers in NH, and the observers in MA all saw more, thanks to a blizzard along the coast and in southeast Mass. The nor'easter developed amazingly quickly due in part to cold and dry arctic air from Canada. (Umm, it's always Canada.) January tried to make up for December's warmth and brought me 11 days with sub-zero low temps with three below -10°F. The coldest was -16.9°F. My mini-split heat pump gives up around -4°F. Fortunately, heat from the first floor and a space heater in the bedroom keep things tolerable.

February bounced back on the warm side, but also had four sub-zero days. The 17th/18th brought 0.78" of rain and warm temperatures which melted 2" of the 3" of the water in the snowpack, and the 22nd brought 1.03" more rain. I declared just a trace of snow cover on the 24th, so that means I'll have an exceptionally short period of continuous snow cover this season.

With a notable exception, March continued warmer than average and without much snow. An inch of snow on the 28th will likely mark the end of this winter's snow season. The day started out at 27.2° at midnight, the high for the day. By dawn we were at 15.9° and the afternoon "high" was only 21.9°. We ended the day at 13.3°. Concord's 0000 temperature of 27°

set a new record low high temperature for the day by one degree. It would have been spectacular had the cold air moved in a few hours earlier.

April was uneventful. Temperature-wise it was very close to average. Snow-wise, paltry. The only event here brought rain that changed to a little slush.

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
Ashland MA 1.2 1 24.9 62 16 81 4.1 18
Fairhaven MA 1.3 2 20.3 49 8.8 55 1.3 1
Pepperell MA 0.1 0 2.9 5 19.5 99 11.2 107 5.2 23 0 0
Bow NH 1.3 4.5 9.3 60.5 19.2 201 15.1 220.5 8.5 91 0 0
Bristol NH 17.1 103.5 14.3 254 16.6 226.5 7 26.5 0.4 0
Sutton Mills NH 3.1 7.5 11.2 46.5 21 209 12.4 213 9.2 31.5 0.3 0

2021-2022 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
Ashland MA 46.2 162 3.5
Fairhaven MA 31.7 107 3.4
Pepperell MA 38.9 234 6.0
Bow NH 53.4 577.5 10.8
Bristol NH 55.4 610.5 11.0
Sutton Mills NH 57.2 507.5 8.9

Contributors

The CoCoRaHS column is the "station number" registered at Community Collaborative Rain, Hail & Snow Network, an organization founded to create a much denser network of precipitation data than the National Weather Service entities can provide. One of these years I might look into downloading CoCoRaHS data each month and add that data here.

Name Location CoCoRaHS
Dennis Bollea Fairhaven MA  
Steve Gunn Bristol NH NH-GR-1
Jim Hilt Bow NH NH-MR-4
Jot Ross Ashland MA  
Paul Venditti Pepperell MA  
Ric Werme Sutton Mills NH NH-MR-63

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 consistently. (And if only one area reports depth days, it would not be a good comparative statistic.)

Last update: 2022 June 1
Ric Werme

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