A snow pillow is a device for measuring

snow Snow comprises individual ice crystals that grow while suspended in the atmosphere—usually within clouds—and then fall, accumulating on the ground where they undergo further changes. It consists of frozen crystalline water throughout ...

pack, especially for automated reporting stations such as

SNOTEL 300px, Data from a SNOTEL site in Elko County, Nevada SNOTEL is an automated system of snowpack and related climate sensors operated by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) of the United States Department of Agriculture in the Weste ...

. The snow pillow measures the water equivalent of the snow pack based on hydrostatic pressure created by overlying snow. Any discrepancy due to bridging is minimized by the large dimension of the pillow, typically . Another application for snow pillows is to estimate the snow weight on a roof to warn of potential for roof collapse. Snow pillows were developed in the early 1960s.

Set-up

Large dimensions (e.g. 3 m × 3 m) of the pillow prevent any bridging that might occur from having an effect on the measurement readings. For snow pressure measurement on roofs using a smaller snow pillow (e.g. 1 m × 1 m) is the better choice, because of the weight of the filling of the snow pillow.

References

Snow Telemetry Meteorological instrumentation and equipment {{climate-stub

Set-up

See also

References