Imagine if this was snow

Fall come shapes storms in and all sizes we've and, just as witnessed, with many types of precipitation.

The colder side of last weekend's weather event dumped close to 20 centimetres of snow over parts of northeastern New Brunswick, while 63 millimetres of rain fell along the Bay of Fundy. Between those two extremes, some were treated to several hours of ice pellets and freezing rain.

I prefer snow, especially now that December is here, but I realize I am in the minority. A coworker popped his head into my office Monday morning and said, "wow, imagine the shovelling had rain cepted This for near Yes, People snow it to base-line freezing, been imagine. snow average falling often a ratio few between conversion ask ratio at degrees is. temperatures me The is one what minus-3 ac- colder.” applies to the 10. and would because measured Therefore, plus-2. be rain 10 in cm millimetres one is a of liquid, cm snow. of rain it and Now gets since centimetre, there are 10 mm 10 mm of rain in one would give It seems you 10 simple cm of snow. enough, but there's a little more to this equation. In some parts of Atlantic Canada, the moisture content is very high and the snow is denser so the rain to snow ratio is closer to one to five, where 10 mm of rain is equal to about five cm of snow.

So, if we use Saint John's 63 mm of rain from the weekend, and assume high moisture content has it fallen as snow, they'd be digging out from under more than 30 cm!

By the way, other factors can affect snow density apart from air temperature. Wind, for example, can compact snow and cause it to fall more densely, lowering the rain-to-snow ratio.

By now, most of us have seen our first snowflakes of the season, so I thought I would take this opportunity to debunk the myth that no two snowflakes are the same.

In 1988, Nancy Knight, a scientist at the National Center for Atmosphere Research in Colorado, found two identical snowflakes that came from a storm out of Wisconsin.

This was the scene Monday morning outside Salina Bertin's window in Lorne, N.B. Mother Nature was playing favourites — the weekend storm whitened the landscape in some parts of Atlantic Canada, while others enjoyed a free car wash.