December 3, 2007

Not many adventures today, although it snowed a lot and is still snowing. I walk to work so it's not a big deal when it snows - no spinning my wheels in the driveway. However, the plows had been out by the time I was walking at 7:30 and they had shoved all the snow from the road to the edges of the sidewalks. This meant there was a very large (and dense) snow bank to clamber over if you wanted to cross the street. Which I did at several points. I wore my knee-high boots and I still got snow down one.

As usual, whoever they have plowing around the old Nepean City Hall is extremely efficient and I was able to walk by that building complex without an effort.

By 9:30 I was making my way over to the GoodLife gym at the Loblaws and the parking lot was still in the process of being plowed - I think it was a continuous kind of job today. They have to shove all that snow somewhere and then come get it later and take it away in trucks to the big city snow dump.

Here's another giant pile of snow over behind the Marshy's. And it's not done yet. Here's the website I use for constant monitoring of the weather. You can get to the radar and satellite and everything there. So far, they say we had 5mm of "precipitation" yesterday. The website goes on to explain:

Q.
What does Yesterday's Precipitation Total mean? Does it include snowfall?
A.
"Yesterday's Total Precipitation", in the table on the "5 day weather page", is a total of all the types of precipitation that may have fallen on the previous day including: rain, drizzle, freezing drizzle, freezing rain, hail and snow.
The unit used to express "Yesterday's Total Precipitation" is millimetres. Therefore any snow that has fallen is melted and this amount of liquid water is recorded in millimetres and added to any other amounts from other forms of precipitation (i.e. rain). Even if snow was the only type of precipitation to fall on the previous day, the snow is melted and the water equivalent is reported in millimetres.

and...

In many snow events a ratio of 10 to 1 can be applied to the amount of snow to determine its water equivalent. In other words, 1 centimetre of snow is equivalent to about 1 millimetre of water once the snow is melted. This means that in many snowfall situations (on days when only snow fell), you can simply change the units from millimetres to centimetres on the "Yesterday's Precip. Total" on a specific location's weather page to get a reasonably good idea of how much snow fell.

So we had 5 cm of snow "yesterday". I'll have to check tomorrow, to see what we had today!