John's Journal

[Midwest Player]

I'm curious where the 130 inches comes from for least snowfall. I always thought it was 81.30 inches in winter of 1930-1931.

"I don’t have the answer to how badly we will pay for it, but there will most certainly be some reciprocity going forward. How can I be confident? Well, lets say that we will not get much snow for at least the first half of this week. That puts us at December 10, one third of the month without much snow for the season to date. Our area averages around 250″ per season. The least is 130″. So it is safe to say that we should anticipate somewhere between 130-250″ of snow by the time it all ends. That’s a fair amount of snow to cram into around 3 1/2 months."

https://www.mtu.edu/alumni/favorites/snowfall/

 

[Admin]

That's a good question. My answer is that I am skeptical of the data prior to the 1940's. It was in the 1940's that the NWS standardized snowfall measuring. Prior to that, the methods used could be and were different. One of those differences was the number of times the snowfall was measured in a 24 hours period.

I was not around then, so I cannot say first hand, but I speculate that the 24 measurement came the result of just one measurement. These days, it can be as many as, but no more than, 4 in a 24 hour period and is usually at least 2 for all locations. Because of the fact that snow settles immediately after falling, the amounts recorded are abt to be less measuring only once in a set time frame vs more than once. If you look at the data from the 1930's and earlier, the seasonal totals are noticeably less than from the 1940's forward. I suspect that it was the 1940's when the measurements for a 24 hour period were taken more than once in a 24 hour period. Because of that, I do not include data from the 1930's and earlier in my analysis.

-John