Were you annoyed, the past couple of days, trying to look up New Haven’s snowfall total? And only finding official numbers for towns that aren’t New Haven?
I was. So last night, after once again striking out on the internet, I started taking measures, literally, finding the worthiest downtown oases of untouched snow and plunging an oversized ruler through them.
My method—logging multiple separated measurements of sites with flat, solid ground (like concrete, not grass), then averaging them into site-specific totals, half a day or more after the snow stopped falling—couldn’t actually measure snowfall. It could only measure snow depth. And due to factors including the way snow settles, there’s no question my depth measurements are lower—probably significantly lower—than the total snowfall at any given site.
Still, for being measured at all, these numbers may offer the best guidance we’ve got:
• Broadway Triangle walkway—9.625”
• Chapel Street surface lot—11.25”
• Crown Street Garage roof—9.75”
• Federal Plaza—9.875”
• New Haven Green gravel path—9.5”
• Temple Street Garage roof—10.75”
Average all the averages and you get 10.125 inches.
The National Weather Service advises rounding to the nearest whole number when measuring snow depth. But since they’ve apparently left us in the lurch for this unusually heavy storm, depriving us of the higher snowfall number that would’ve better confirmed our hardiness, I say we keep the extra eighth of an inch.
Written by Dan Mims. Image licensed from Shutterstock.
