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It snowed on the Gulf Coast today, so I got curious to measure the volume of water to air content of snow. (lemmy.world)
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by over_clox@lemmy.world to c/casualconversation@lemm.ee
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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

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[-] suburban_hillbilly@lemmy.ml 10 points 5 months ago

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.

[-] over_clox@lemmy.world 5 points 5 months ago

I'm aware there's different consistencies of snow and whatnot, I was just bored yo, sucks basically being stuck inside.

this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2025
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