Do you know a way to find daily snow water equivalent data, for just snow and not any rain that may have fallen same day?
Backstory:
Hi, I'm pretty new to all this. I work for a small city that wants to have better data to analyze our past snow-plowing operations. For that we need to know how much snow there was.
We have had a million debates (familiar to you I'm sure) about all the different kinds of snow, and we've decided it's not fair to compare snow-inches - i.e. it will take longer to remove a few inches of wet heavy snow than many inches of light, dry snow.
Instead, we've decided to compare inches of equivalent water (what we call liquid equivalent inches but what I think is more properly called snow water equivalent). So my question is how to find this data.
I've found lots of data that shows both the snowfall inches and the precipitation. So, seems like you could just look for days when there is snowfall, and then take the precipitation. Here's a picture of NOAA data for an example. You'd say that on Dec. 14, there was no snow, and on Dec. 15, there was 1 inch of snow, which was formed by 1.14 inches of precipitation.
However! This data does not actually tell the whole story. Because on Dec. 15, first it rained a bunch, and then gradually that became snow. So the 1 inch of snow was formed by only some fraction of that 1.14 inches of precipitation. I'm only interested in the snow water equivalent of the snow itself.
So, what data can I used to get the snow water equivalent of just the snow?
My best thought has been to find data that gives snow, rain, and total precipitation inches in separate columns. Then I can find snow water equivalents by subtracting rain from total precip. Except, I can't find any such data - it all seems to be just snow, and total precip.
Do you know where I can find such data? Or do you have a different idea?
