Spencers Creek snow season start

Spencers Creek season start

Snow depths are recorded weekly by Snowy Hydro Limited at Spencers Creek near Charlotte Pass, midway between Perisher Valley and Thredbo, NSW, Australia. This shows the season start-up, by plotting the percent of years with no snow at dates through April-May-June¹. Note that it’s no snow at the date, not by the date. Some years will have had snow earlier, but lost it.

There is a suggestion of a slightly later season start in recent times, but not by much — by about two weeks at the 50th percentile, and less elsewhere. That’s in stark contrast to the melt phase, which now happens a month earlier than it did 50 years ago.

Note:

1. The graph was made by running a 14-day window over the weekly resampled snow depth record and computing the percentage of zeros in that across the record lengths shown. Most years have two weekly depths in each 14-day window, both of which are counted in the percentage, which is plotted centred. The “whole record” curve is smoothed with a 5-day FWHM Gaussian; the others are unsmoothed.

No comments yet to Spencers Creek snow season start

  • Connell Burke

    That’s a great chart. Does timing of the first snowfall have a strong relationship with the snowfall for the rest of the ski season? It looks like we won’t have snow for a few weeks.

    • Gerg

      Don’t know; never really looked hard at that. A spokesperson from ?BOM said no recently in media, but strikes me there should be some relationship. Worth some work and maybe a post.

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