Use of Gridded Snowfall from NOAA’s Office of Water Prediction at the Weather Prediction Center

Examples of the operational application of gridded snowfall data for forecast verification and the development of monthly and seasonal climatologies will be shown. While recent improvements in the accuracy of Office of Water Prediction snowfall observations have led to its application in forecast verification, event summaries, and seasonal reviews, some challenges remain, especially across the higher elevations and remote areas of the western United States where radar and data processing artifacts can contribute to a degradation in the snowfall analysis. Nonetheless, this data source is a significant improvement over the sparsity and poor-quality snowfall information from the past. The winter of 2019-20 will be the 7th year in a row this high resolution analysis dataset has been available in nearly real time from NOAA.