Quick report
The warming temperatures over the past few days have caused the snow from the most recent two storms to settle into dense slabs. Although north aspects still have unconsolidated, powdery snow, many southerly aspects have crusts of varying depths that make for more challenging turns. These slabs are insulating the persistent weak layer deeper in the snowpack, which is rounding and stabilizing but can still be found on north aspects.
As new precipitation comes in with warm temperatures, further observation will be necessary to determine how the mixed precip adheres to these surface conditions that already vary across aspects and elevations.
No signs of instability on the terrain we covered; prior snow has settled into a dense slab, especially where it has received solar exposure.Weather
- Air Temp
- 29
- Cloud Cover
- obscured
- Wind Loading
- previous
- Recent Snowfall
- 0.5
- Snow Avail For Transport
- small smounts
Clear and calm when we entered the field, but clouds rolled in from the southwest and quickly obscured cloud cover. Was still calm but snowing steadily when we left the field.
Snowpack
New snow since Feb 14 has already settled considerably and increased in density with the warmer temps on Tuesday, especially on sun-affected aspects where enough melting has occurred to form crusts of up to 3cm thick. On north aspects where we dug a pit, we did observe progressive collapse in CTs within the most recent storm snow and further down on the Jan 31 surface hoar/facet layer, but no propagation in an ECT.