New snow height from RADAR

I love snow, especially powder snow, and I like skiing. For this reason every time a snowfall occurs in my region, I always look at weather stations and webcams to understand where the largest amount of accumulated fresh snow is. However, automatic weather stations and webcams don’t give you a large scale view of the precipitation patterns.

Thus, I implemented a method for the estimation of the amount of accumulated freshly fallen snow at regional scale, using only meteorological radar data and air temperature measurements at 2 meters above the ground. The fresh snow accumulated during the previous 1, 3, 6, 12, 24, 48, and 72 hours is shown on maps that are updated every 1 hour.

It should be noted that the developed method does not take into account the effect of wind erosion and deposition on the snowpack, which can cause a large spatial variability in the thickness of fresh snow, and therefore generate even marked differences between the observed and the estimated values.

The data to produce the maps are freely provided by the Italian Civil Protection API, and the results are shown below on this page.