Snow Depth, stupid question???

It all depends if your skiing pasture, the less rock the less snow needed.

Snapzzz wrote:Gummy, that is awesome.

Agreed. Gummy, your son is 6 inches tall! Awesome! :mrgreen:

GummyBear wrote:Just thought id show snapz another picture to give him an idea about snow depths, yours ?

Where ?

The snow depth is actually quite relative. In glacier resorts they do not report the depth of new snow on the glacier but the depth of the glacier. Thats why in some resorts in Switzerland you'll see reports of 3m of snow on the mountain and 20cm in the town in the early season.

While glacier mass balance is decreasing in many places I don't we've quite arrived at a point where the depth in the accumulation zone is down to three metres. Glacial depths in Switzerland are around 70m on average IIRC.

ise wrote:While glacier mass balance is decreasing in many places I don't we've quite arrived at a point where the depth in the accumulation zone is down to three metres. Glacial depths in Switzerland are around 70m on average IIRC.

That very much depends on the glacier. Engelberg and Laax post 3-4m of snow at the start of the season every year and there is no way that much snow has accumulated yet. In these cases they are measuring on the glacier. Whether they are measuring right down to rock or not I don't know, but it is certainly glacier and not new accumulated snow.

Admin wrote:

Snapzzz wrote:Gummy, that is awesome.

Agreed. Gummy, your son is 6 inches tall! Awesome! :mrgreen:

Haha oh god im only 18 ! It's actually a picture a friend took haha.

ir12daveor wrote:
That very much depends on the glacier. Engelberg and Laax post 3-4m of snow at the start of the season every year and there is no way that much snow has accumulated yet. In these cases they are measuring on the glacier. Whether they are measuring right down to rock or not I don't know, but it is certainly glacier and not new accumulated snow.

Average glacier depths in their accumulation zones around Switzerland are 70m as I already pointed out. From that you know for certain a snow report of 3m isn't the glacier depth.

I'm not able to speculate what a hypothetical snow report may or may not be measuring but if I saw a report in December for, as an example, Zermatt, telling there was 2m of snow on the glacier I would know that was new snow from that winter.

So when you see Engleberg reporting depths in December of around a 1.5m (that's the actual recorded, reported historical figure) you're seeing new snow that's fallen in that winter.

I can't see why that's surprising, it's snowing right now, the zero isotherm is beginning to settle below 3000m so higher glaciers are accumulating snow. It would surprising if there wasn't a couple of metres of snow accumulated by December. In fact, that relatively low figure of 1.5m for Engelberg reflects a fairly poor start to the last season. It's the same for the 1.7m that Laax reported in December last year. In point of fact, neither Engelberg nor Laax ever reported more than 3m for the whole of the previous season, the highest measure was 3m or so in April which represents the season accumulation.

And, physically, practically, how is it measured? By putting a pole in the snow of the glacier at the start of the winter, or more likely around now, and seeing how far up the pole the snow goes.

The first reports for Engelberg last season were 0cm lower and 45cm upper in November then 48cm/123cm in December, there's nothing I find surprising about that.