We are buried in the furthest corner of NW Colorado. The drifts in the barnyard are so dramatic one almost needs crampons to navigate. And, where they’ve plowed it looks like a ski area parking lot. I remember Durango like this, you couldn’t see over the snowplow piles while driving down the highway.
Excuse the rant from a statistician, but I'm tired of everyone using "percent of normal/mean/median" to convey how much snow we are getting. That statistic is okay, but it's not enough. The problem is that it has no relation whatsoever to the year-to-year variably in annual snowfall. For example, Upper Dolores River watershed is reported to be at 137% of normal right now. Mathematically, we could get past 137% all the time or maybe this is very unusual... you just don't know based on this reported number. You need a standard deviation, or something like that, to put the whole story together. A common alternative would be to report if this is a 60th, 90th, or a 99th percentile year.
We are buried in the furthest corner of NW Colorado. The drifts in the barnyard are so dramatic one almost needs crampons to navigate. And, where they’ve plowed it looks like a ski area parking lot. I remember Durango like this, you couldn’t see over the snowplow piles while driving down the highway.
I cant decide is this is “good” news of not considering my hatred of that damn dam.
Excuse the rant from a statistician, but I'm tired of everyone using "percent of normal/mean/median" to convey how much snow we are getting. That statistic is okay, but it's not enough. The problem is that it has no relation whatsoever to the year-to-year variably in annual snowfall. For example, Upper Dolores River watershed is reported to be at 137% of normal right now. Mathematically, we could get past 137% all the time or maybe this is very unusual... you just don't know based on this reported number. You need a standard deviation, or something like that, to put the whole story together. A common alternative would be to report if this is a 60th, 90th, or a 99th percentile year.