Sandaysoft

I know it's way to early to be think about snow but has anyone with a National Geaographic touch screen HWS fiqured away to measure snow. If any one has could you let me know the best way to do it. My thaught was would using heat tape on the rain gauge work or would it be a waist of time plus would it melt the rain gauge at any point.

Thanks

Jim Laursen
Melita, MB Canada

Some observers do have heated rain gauges (i don't know if anyone's done it with a Fine Offset gauge) and measure the amount of water due to snow, but it can't really tell you to any degree of accuracy how much snow has fallen in terms of feet and inches, as the density of snow varies so much.

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Steve
Sanday Weather
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Being in Manitoba, you'll need way more than a little heat tape to guarantee melting snow. Environment Canada still uses a ruler (maybe with a camera focused on it) at their sites. I have seen experimental gear using ultrasonics, but even if you got that to work reliably, in the end you'd need to manually enter the data anyway.

Also, even if you could successfully melt the snow, I think you'll find there is no consistent formula to convert it back to snow depth, since the amount of water to snow depth ratio varies considerably. It's a cool project idea though, (no pun intended).

Hi,

It might be worth putting a heating resistor and thermostatic sensor inside the rain gauge (it's easy enough to open up) but of course you defeat the "wireless" nature of the FO kit. Perhaps also use thermal insulation around the sides of the rain sensor; a few months ago I calculated the energy needed just to melt the snow, in an existing thread here.

But for the actual depth of snow then a webcam is the obvious answer, or if you're into microcontroller development then maybe an ultrasonic distance (vertically down to the snow level) gauge. I'm working (slowly) on a "homebuilt" project which might add such data (it's not the primary aim) to the standard FO kit. However, I don't know how you'd handle the melting (rate) of the snow and of course Cumulus won't "recognise" any such additional data.

Cheers, Alan.