Wet snow vs. dry snow: Which is better?

You may already be sick of shovelling the snow from your driveway or sidewalk, but fortunately for Manitobans, it’s a dry snow.

“Wet snow has more liquid water attached to it. Barely above zero degrees is where we usually sort of get the heavier, wet snow,” John Hanesiak, an environment and geography professor at the University of Manitoba, told Global News.

“Drier snow is sort of what we’ve seen this past snowfall. When temperatures are minus 10 or minus 15, it’s a drier snow so it’s not heavy and wet to shovel.”

The snow accumulation in Manitoba is welcome news in terms of overcoming the damage done from last year’s devastating drought.

“Every little bit helps, there’s no question about that,” Hanesiak said. “The last couple of winters we’ve had not a whole lot of snow, so this year it will certainly help things. There’s a lot more snow this year than we had last year for sure.”

But environmental experts say some snow does more than others when it comes to actually putting moisture in the ground.

“There’s sort of a rule of thumb that we try to use; it’s sort of a 10-to-one ratio,” Hanesiak said.

That means 10 cm of snowfall generally melts into about one centimetre of water, but experts say that can vary significantly.

“In extreme cases the variation can range from 40 to four. In other words, the snow is so dry that all you can squeeze out of 40 centimetres of snow is one centimetre of water such as on the Prairies because the atmosphere is so moisture-starved and the snow is so dry,” Environment and Climate Change Canada senior climatologist David Phillips explained in an email.

“On the other hand, in a big storm full of moisture from the United States, four centimetres of snow might yield one centimetre of water.”

While it may be a more of a nuisance to shovel and walk through, when it comes to bouncing back from last year’s drought, Phillips said a wet spring snow might be even more beneficial to agricultural producers.

Carson Callum, the general manager of Manitoba Beef Producers, says they’re just happy to see the snow accumulate.

“It’s definitely more than we got last year at the start of the 2021 production season,” Callum said.

“What I see out there is great and if we get more, it will be a benefit. Especially with how deficient we were in moisture out there throughout the summer out there last year.”

0:57 Recent snowfall not enough to quell drought fears: KAP