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.
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 |
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 |
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 |
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.)