El Niño

I wish I had good news. But I don't. Any moment the head honchos at Steamboat Ski Area are going to have to do something terrible. They will have to begin closing runs in January due to lack of snow.

Now I say this coyly as weather is never predictable, but if trends are trends - things ain't getting better. I geekily put together some data and plotted it for comparison purposes. I plotted known El Niño years(1) as defined by some class notes from Dr. Nolan Atkins, some Professor from Lyndon State College, that my dad sent me. I then grabbed some data from the Western Regional Climate Center which compiled snow fall totals by month since the beginning of the 20th Century(2).

I had to repair some of the data as the monitoring equipment missed a few days. If the month was between December and March, I added the daily average for that year's month to the number of data points missed. I also had to get rid of the 86-87, 29-30, and 07-08 years due to serious errors in recording - fucking drunk ass Forest Ranger, hope that guy was fired. I have no idea where this snow depth is measured. But again, my dad sent me the link, so it must be right. Right?

As you can see, the plot on the left shows El Niño years and the plot on the right shows non El Niño years. Plotted on the same y axis scale the bell curve for El Niño years shows much lighter snow than non El Niño years.


(click to enlarge)

Plotted over time for average annual snowfall, El Niño years produce less snow on average. As you can see, the left plot shows El Niño average snowfall at approximately 140 inches a year and non El Niño years trending down from 175 inches near the turn of the century to 160 inches today. So while, that difference isn't huge, it's still less.


(click to enlarge)

Searching for good news, I looked to see if maybe El Niño years produced more snow in the spring months. While it seems that a typical March during an El Niño year may hold up to Marches in years without El Niño conditions, it still doesn't look pretty. NO LUCK! Ouch! I'll be on rock skis all year!


(click to enlarge)

Per Snotel data(3), we are at 69% of average snow water equivalent and 78% of average precipitation accumulation on 1/19.

Start praying people!!! Now that I wrote this, it won't stop dumping 'til March 25th! Bam!

References:
(1) http://apollo.lsc.vsc.edu/classes/met130/notes/chapter10/elnino.html
(2) http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/cgi-bin/cliMONtsnf.pl?costea
(3) http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/snotelanom/snotelbasin