Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) relies heavily on assistance from the public for actual snowfall depths and rainfall amounts and you could be a great help to them.

Meteorologist Natalie Hasell explains that their facilities only measure liquid equivalents of snowfalls by taking a gauge filled with snow and heating it up. The snow melts to give them the actual depth of water that fell. 

There is a website that covers Canada and the US where anybody can submit measurements of the depth of actual snow and rainfall amounts.

"We do have cocorahs.org, which is the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail & Snow Network (CoCoRaHS)," says Hasell. "If anyone is interested in becoming an observer for us at this volunteer network, you can certainly contact CoCoRaHS and they'll set you up with the information that you need. The requirement is measuring snow amounts, in this case, once a day in the morning and maybe giving a little bit of a report of how the time went, if you're still around to do that.”

Hasell says they don't get reports consistently from every volunteer in CoCoRaHS which means there might be a report from the southeast on some days, and not on others.

She notes there are several volunteers in the region. "We also look at X (formerly Twitter) and see if anyone reports there. If you are going to go the route of social media, use #MBstorm and take a photo, or a time-lapse preferably with a ruler, so that we actually know what we're looking at and we don't have to worry about scale."

She stresses that this should only be done if it's safe for you, and any observation is useful to them, but they don't want people putting themselves at risk for it.

"With the way we measure snow, we'll get an idea of what to expect for the coming season by the time it's done. But actually, how much snow fell is really dependent on other people, unfortunately."

 

With files from Michael Blume

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