The Official Snow Stake is located high atop Mount Mansfield, Vermont's highest mountain (elevation 4393', or 1339m). Actually, the stake isn't quite at the summit: it's located a bit lower, around 3900', just off the Toll Road which leads to the summit ridge.

Summit weather conditions were formerly reported to the National Weather Service each night by a crew of engineers stationed at the WCAX television transmitter located on the ridgeline. Effective January 1, 2018, after over 50 years of cooperation, the new owners of WCAX discontinued this service. The National Weather Service stepped in with electronic monitoring devices for all data except New Snowfall, which per NWS observing standards requires a physical observer.

Disclaimer Approximate values for new snow fall after January 01, 2018 have been calculated from the snow depth observations. The calculated values may not reflect snow compaction, and definately do not meet NWS standards, but I'd rather have a modest approximation than mising data.

For our purposes, we obtain the daily data via the Vermont State Hydrological Report. We download the report each day at around 7:00 pm, strip out the Mansfield data, and add it to our archive. Note that this graph is displayed in ski season time: a ski season runs from September 1 to August 31. Thus, selecting Year=1999 displays data from September 1 1999 to August 31 2000.

The Mount Mansfield Snow Depth graph was one of the first web applications deployed at the University of Vermont.