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Although there are much lower snow depths elsewhere, the early-February snows of Peter Bartl's upper Balfour are deep.<\/p><\/div>\n
Why do we \u2026\u00a0above Balfour, have so much more snow than everybody else along the West Arm \u2026\u00a0as you drive into Nelson, [there is] often no snow in spots along the way?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The short answer is that Balfour is\u00a0exposed to southeasterly winds in a way that the rest of the West Arm is not.<\/p>\n
Much of the heavy snow of winter arrives with the approach of cyclones\u2014the travelling areas of low pressure that move over us from the west. That snow falls from the mid\u2013levels of the atmosphere where it formed well above our mountain tops. If nothing else happens, that snow falls fairly uniformly across the region. But, something else does happen around Balfour\u2014something that is different than elsewhere on the West Arm.<\/p>\n
As a storm approaches, the low\u2013level winds (below the mountain tops) are from the south to southeast, and as a map reveals, Balfour is open to those winds in a way that the rest of the Arm is not. As the air flows up the mountain slope above Balfour, low\u2013level clouds form. Those clouds don\u2019t actually produce much snow on their own, but they do greatly modify the snow from higher up as it falls through them. The snow from above grows quickly as it passes through those moisture\u2013rich lower clouds. This produces considerably more snow for upper Balfour.<\/p>\n
And there you have it: Balfour\u2019s exposure to southeast winds produces low\u2013level clouds that enhance the local snowfall well over that which falls elsewhere along the West Arm. The same explanation should apply to the Township of Queens Bay.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Peter Bartl is a friend who lives on the high ground of Balfour. Knowing of my interest in things meteorological, he asked: Why do we \u2026\u00a0above Balfour, have so much more snow than everybody else along the West Arm \u2026\u00a0as … Continue reading