Cool Stuff You Never Knew About Snow!

Snow everybody's favorite four letter word has been falling a lot lately even in places where snow is a whole new concept. Well, I've been pondering snow, walking in snow, snowshoeing in snow, post-holing in snow up to my waist a bunch recently. So, here are three interesting facts I have learned about snow over the last few weeks as I prepared to teach an advanced snow science class.




1) It doesn't need to be warm to melt snow.
The temperature here in Colorado has been all over the map, 50 degrees one day 20 degrees the next with a lovely (said with a huge amount of sarcasm) wind. I was pondering the snow fluctuations recorded by our SNOTEL trying to get a handle on why if we get 241 inches of snow (that's a little over 20 feet) in an average year (October to June) why there never seems to be more than about 41-70 inches at any one time at the SNOTEL gauge?  The obvious answer is it melts. The only thing is while it can be 50 degrees at my house at the SNOTEL site, 3,000 feet above my house, the temperature ranged from 24-31 degrees Fahrenheit. So where the heck is all the snow going? Sublimation is the answer!  The constant 30-60 mile per hour winds are causing the snow to go straight from a solid into a gas without needing to melt first. A scientific paper I read showed the snow pack in the research location, not too far from where I work, decreased by 15% each year just due to sublimation.


2) Fresh power makes my eyes hurt!
Ever wonder why it seems brighter right after a light fluffy snow falls than a few days later?  Freshly fallen snow has the ability to reflect 90% of the solar rays which hit it's surface. After a few days when the snow has a chance to compact it looses some of its ability to reflect sunlight and only can reflect about 50% f the sunlight hitting it.


3) Best Insulation Ever!
There is naturally a small amount of heat radiating up from under the surface if the ground. Build yourself a snow cave and you can trap some of that radiating heat to help keep yourself warm.  Small animals, such as mice, have figured this out. While the surface of the snow maybe frozen solid the natural heat radiating from the ground causes the lower layers to melt slightly changing the shape of the ice crystals. This new crystal shape looks like sugar grains, hence the name sugar snow, this snow is much easier for small critters to move through than the hard wind packed snow on the surface.