I cut the top of a 16.9 ounce water bottle off, and filled it flush to the top with loose dry snow to let melt and measure. The cut bottle measured right at 5½ inches tall, once it melted down there was right at ¾ of an inch of water. That’s only about 13.64% of the initial volume, meaning the snow was about 86.36% air.
We also just got a weather update for our town, they’re saying we got about 7 inches of snow, which would have only been just shy of an inch of rain (about 61/64 of an inch), if it hadn’t come down as snow.
Edit: 7 inches ≈ 1 banana
http://bananaforscale.info/#!/convert/length/7/inches/bananas
There is also the issue of sublimation where a solid skips the liquid step and goes straight to a gasious state. This is pretty common in snow meaning some of that volume was lost due to sublimation.
If you truly want to know weight will get you closer. Weigh the snow, then fill the container with the equivalent amount of water
I love it when people who rarely get snow get to geek out about it
Normal norwegian figures are 10mm snow is 1mm rain. Not to far off your 86% air
Now I’m curious how much the different types of snow shapes translate to volume 🤔
Here’s the best related scientific video I’ve seen on the subject of snow and snowflakes so far…
If it snowed in the gulf coast hell must have frozen over.
Can’t think of why that would happen in the US this week.
Don’t you worry. They’ll burn plenty of coal, oil and gas to compensate for that.
If you’re a gulf coaster I suppose you can be forgiven for not knowing that the density of snow can vary wildly, as well as not knowing how depth is measured. Snow as measured when falling is only measured an inch at a time because snow compacts as it piles up. So your 5.5 inch bottle may well contain more snow than fell, depth-wise.
Snow can also be so heavy and wet that it barely differs from liquid water in density. Your test is sometimes done as a high school science lab here and the average we get is closer to 3 in snow: 1 inch rain.
I’m aware there’s different consistencies of snow and whatnot, I was just bored yo, sucks basically being stuck inside.
That’s pretty cool. How much snow do they say you got?
The weather people said about 7 inches, which seems about right from when I took our dog for a walk earlier.
It was Brownie’s first time seeing snow, I almost couldn’t get him to go outside. He wasn’t having any of that shit either, he didn’t go far at all past going down the stairs to stop in his tracks and make some yellow snow. Then he was like fuck this, time to go back inside.
Ahaha, a very reasonable response to snow from a living being with foot who doesn’t get to put on socks!
Damn, i was not expecting you to say that much. That’s a good amount even up north for a couple days of snow. Not storm, but they’d put an advisory out for 7.
Lol that’s funny, my grandparents dog does that
