If you’re one of those people who loves to brag or complain about how much snow you get – and since this is New Hampshire, of course you are – now’s your chance to one-up everybody else.
With one caveat: You have to live close to Concord Municipal Airport and not on a big hill.
The National Weather Service is looking for a new official snow observer, whose tallies will be part of the official weather record. DeAnne Fortier, who has been doing the job since 2004, is moving on.
Fortier says she won’t miss the hours but she did enjoy being the font of knowledge for friends. “People who knew about it, they’re always emailing me: How much snow do we get?”
Regular readers know that I am a weather observer for CoCoRaHS, a citizen-science project that has some 15,000 people in several countries making a reading each morning of precipitation, including snow. Being the NWS snow observer is more work, which is why Fortier received the princely sum of $115 per month from October to April plus $4 per observation.
The big difference between her and me is that when it’s snowing or there’s snow on the ground, the observer has to make measurements four times each 24 hours.
“You call in every six hours starting at 7 a.m. At 1 p.m., I had to go home at lunchtime and measure,” she said. In theory she takes a measurement at 1 a.m. but she negotiated it back to midnight. “I couldn’t be doing 1 a.m. on a worknight!”
For two decades she’s done this, virtually without a break.
“When it was snowing, windy and cold, and it’s midnight, I would think: do I really have to go outside?” she recalled. “But I took it seriously. Somebody has to do it.”
The snow measurements involve depth and, crucially, the snow-water equivalent made by melting the snow. That last figure differentiates between the light fluffy stuff and the heavy wet stuff, important for tracking or predicting droughts and floods.
Concord Municipal Airport has been the location for the National Weather Service’s official New Hampshire tally for – well, I don’t know how long. Probably as long as the airport has existed, since early aviation was a major prod for creating accurate weather measurements. Consistency requires that measurements be made in roughly the same place, year after year. They used to be made at the airport itself but getting somebody there at 1 a.m. is tough.
Fortier was working for Concord Aviation Services at the airport in 2004 when the call went out for an observer. “I said I live three miles from the airport” which would make it easy to get there, but eventually a better idea came up. “They said, you can do it in your backyard if you want to.”
Her Eastside Drive home was fine because her yard is open and “I have a tree windbreak on two sides and a fence so I don’t get a lot of wind” to affect snowfall. The NWS set up the official snow station and 20 years it has been the place that tells us if we just got 0.1 inch or 10 feet of what TV folks love to call the white stuff.
The observer needs to take the measurements on property within 5 miles of the Concord Airport as the crow flies. The site has to be close to the airport elevation – 345 feet above sea level, plus or minus 100 feet – because that has such an effect on the weather. As far as I can tell from topographic maps, this requirement will rule out parts of Pembroke.
If you’re interested, contact Nikki Baker, Observing Program Leader for the NWS, in the regional office in Maine, at 207-688-3221, ext. 225 or nichole.becker@noaa.gov.
As for Fortier, she’s transitioning to her Laconia home, which does have a weather station. But she won’t be monitoring it to the same extent: “If it’s midnight, I’m not going to get up!”
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