How much snow?

[nyker]

With the talk about the lack of snow in some areas, thought this site was interesting.

https://data.usatoday.com/projects/snow ... n-tracker/

A little hard to see exact locations but you can compare it to Google maps and get pretty close.
You can make out the North Cascades, Rainier, Adams, Mt St Helens and Hood as places with a lot not surprisingly.

Interesting that parts of NY and VT have quite a lot so far.

[greenonion]

With the talk about the lack of snow in some areas, thought this site was interesting.

https://data.usatoday.com/projects/snow ... n-tracker/

A little hard to see exact locations but you can compare it to Google maps and get pretty close.
You can make out the North Cascades, Rainier, Adams, Mt St Helens and Hood as places with a lot not surprisingly.

Interesting that parts of NY and VT have quite a lot so far.

Maybe interesting, maybe misleading. We are bone dry here in Utah since October. The timeframe options are 24, 48, 72 hours, and total season (from 1 Oct). October in Utah was very wet. Since then it has been, as stated, bone dry. That to me is misleading given the timeframes that are available on the website. There, most certainly, has been a lack of snow this winter in general in Utah and the west.

[nyker]

Interesting, I clicked on the "season" option and that's pretty accurate around me

[Eli Watson]

That's a useful link for individual storms if you don't have a SNOTEL site close by. This is what I check, it compares the current snowpack in Snow Water Equivalent against the median for that date since 1993. If you click on the individual basin you can see the current year against historical data. For much of Colorado we are bouncing off the minimum of the graph, which is a compilation of all the lowest Water Year data - mostly 2002 & 2018.

https://nwcc-apps.sc.egov.usda.gov/imap ... 9&zoom=5.0

[Chicago Transplant]

For the upper Colorado (my home basin) the SWE today is 5.4 inches (actually down .1 from yesterday). The average day we hit 5.4 is December 19, so the question of "how far behind are we" is answered with about 7 weeks.
Based on what terrain is open at our local ski areas, it certainly lines up with mid December snowpack numbers.

You can click on individual basins in Colorado on this page and have a more interactive graph of that basin, can toggle different years and click on dates to see the SWE numbers for them.
https://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/ftpref/su ... ement=wteq

[Eli Watson]

To contextualize the narrative for those outside of Colorado, the American East & West are having polar opposite (pun intended) winters. The West has been plagued by high pressure domes which have pushed all the storms and cold temperatures around to the Midwest. We've also been incredibly warm with consistent sunny days in the 60s+. I can recall about 5 days this year that felt like true winter. Entire areas of ski resorts have not opened yet this season, and I personally am not optimistic that will change. The common joke around me is that instead of winter this year we got about 3 months of October, and we're already onto spring. We're all hoping for a March reminiscent of 2019, but it's very easy to feel anxious about this summer.

[ECF55]

You can click on individual basins in Colorado on this page and have a more interactive graph of that basin, can toggle different years and click on dates to see the SWE numbers for them.
https://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/ftpref/su ... ement=wteq

THIS. This is definitely what I keep track of and it's one of the most reliable measures of precipitated water equivalent across the state. The toggles for each basin graphic also allow you to pull up historical SNOTEL plots to compare to what we have today. If you want to take it to the next level, you can compare the historical SNOTEL plots to the various Conditions and Trip Reports on 14ers.com for some higher fidelity planning.

The plots are informative, but they don't predict actual conditions on the mountains above treeline. When the plots hit zero in the late spring, there may still be significant snowpack at elevation, depending on all of the variations and nuances of the topography. However, I still think it is a useful predictor of "summer conditions" at the SNOTEL=zero + 4 weeks.

Here's to early monsoon moisture if the snow doesn't pick up. Otherwise, the state may be a tinderbox.

[Jorts]

Plotted different seasons on Snotel. For Red Mountain Pass, this is the worst snow water equivalent at this point in the season since 1990.

Screenshot 2026-02-09 at 12.51.59 PM.png