“Snow” real answer for rain to snow ratio
1969 blizzard in Manhattan
There’s a good chance that if you live in the United States and the weather has dropped below 32 degrees (that’s in Fahrenheit for all you metric stuffed shirts out there) in the past 24 hours, you endured a snowstorm. Washington D.C. and some of the East Coast got battered a few days ago. Then the Midwest had its turn the past two nights, and now that same storm is heading to New York and the surrounding areas. Virginia even suffered through a blizzard with more on the way, and Tucson (yes, Arizona!) is currently under a Winter Storm Warning. Snow is everywhere, and with it comes plenty of snow stories and hyperbole (often by the weathercasters themselves).
The most overheard comment occurs when the weather warms up just enough to make it rain and everyone says “Can you imagine how much snow this would have been?!” Well, not really, because it varies. A lot.
One common belief is that one inch of rain would have resulted in 10 inches of snow. That’s pretty close, but it’s not exactly accurate thanks to incredible variances. One inch of rain (or more correctly, one inch of water) can be found in anywhere from 3 to 100 inches of snow. According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, however,
“The majority of U.S. snows fall with a water-to-snow ratio of between 0.04 and 0.10.”1
Reversing those ratios, that means your one inch of rain could have been 10 to 25 inches of snow. For everyone out there currently experiencing sore backs thanks to shoveling those 10 to 25 inches of snow, reverse the story on your warm weather friends and tell them you wish you were only dealing with an inch of rain right now.
Read on:
NSIDC.org – Snow FAQs (more than you’ll ever need to know about snow)
USAToday.com – Answers archive: Winter, snow, ice
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