High Sierra Topix

Found this website on another board. Its cool. You can watch time lapse data of the snow accumulation/melting, precipitation, etc... in the Sierra.

http://www.nohrsc.noaa.gov/nsa/index.ht ... =11&day=10

Great info! Thanks.

Nice site. As a side note, a number of the telemetry snow pillows operated by California Dept. of Water Resources now report snow depth in addition to water content. Previously you'd have to extrapolate from water content (fresh snow is often 12" snow to 1" water, but that decreases towards spring). The depth seems to be sort of accurate. Bishop Pass, Crabtree and Charlotte Lake now report depth:

http://cdec.water.ca.gov/snow/current/snow/

George

I can imagine what they are doing to create that. As an avid powder skier, I've been monitoring remote CDEC sites for years. There are a modest amount of remote snow weather sites in the Sierra that are growing each year as well as updating of newer equipment. Most run off solar cells. At the end of each month snow surveyors go out checking additional locations. And they know how much water tends to be in each basin because that ends up draining down into reservoirs during the spring. They also can predict water lost from evaporation. Also they have cataloged a lot of different types of winter storms as to storm direction, temps, and all else. So from that and more they are now getting more accurate predicting snow depths. Certainly would at best be a crude estimate but in any case highly interesting. Just in the current display for Dec 5, I can see some inaccuracy. If one looks at the 1k visible Satellite image:

http://sat.wrh.noaa.gov/satellite/1km/M ... IS1MRY.GIF

It will show quite a bit of snow atop the White Mountains while the graph shows hardly any. Note they just have a single remote up their atop the White Mtn Research Station, so it is a case of garbage in garbage out until they get additional sensors in that area.

...David