January 8, 2005, Paradise New Snow Amt?

Anyone at Paradise today care to clear up the discrepancy of 10" new by telemetry vs. the phone report of 2"? Great to have all this technology unless its accuracy is always in question. e.g. see post on Climate differences where the Snotel site is off by &gt;400 vertical ft in location.<br>

We were considering going to Paradise this morning... 10 inches reported, vs 2 inches at Snoqualmie. But Snoqualmie had received more precip (e.g. inches of water), so it was obvious something was awry...<br><br>We hoped for &gt;10 inches at Snoqualmie.... well, it wasn't quite that Maybe 6 tops at higher elevations.<br><br>Maybe the wind blew some snow into the measurement site at Paradise?

The answer (unfortunately) is that the MRNP phone report is not very trustworthy for providing accurate snowfall and snowdepth. For several years, I've been comparing the values given there with the official numbers that the park provides to the National Climatic Data Center, and there are often large discrepancies between them (most of the time the numbers are identical, though). Today's phone message where the nice gentleman states that "new snow at Paradise is a couple of inches" is certainly a prime example of these discrepancies.<br><br>The NWAC telemetry is generally very accurate on snowdepth, unless these is an obvious offset error which causes the sensor to be stuck at its maximum reading (usually caused by snow/rime buildup on the ultrasonic distance sensor head) or occasional random negative-value glitches. However, the NWAC telemetry site is about 120 ft higher than the official MRNP snow stake (located beside the Guide House and recorded once daily, unless extreme weather prevents access to Paradise). So the NWAC site usually has a few percent greater snowdepth and slightly different temperature and precip values. Today's official MRNP observation showed 9" of new snow with 96" snowdepth, closely matching the NWAC telemetry values of 9-10" new and 100-101" snowdepth.<br><br>The best place to get recent official observations is the NWS listing of Weather Conditions for: RAINIER PARADISE RANGER STN, WA (ASFW1) Elev: 5427 ft , which has the last 30 days of daily observations. Other useful mountain locations in WA are:<br> Weather Conditions for: LONGMIRE RAINER NPS, WA (RLGW1) Elev: 2762 ft <br> Weather Conditions for: MT ADAMS RANGER STN, WA (MTAW1) Elev: 1960 ft <br>If someone knows of a more complete list of these links (to sites with snowdepths, not just RAWS sites), please post it. Thanks.<br><br>

We were in the Tatoosh today, and I would say that 10" of new was about right although a bit heavier than  expected.  Maybe it's the temperature gauge that is wrong ???