Station VISB

Questions for Johan Nordevall, Magnus Larsson, Rickard Sirefelt, and Emil Staf

Snow Measurements in Visby, Sweden

Snow depth for GPS site Visby was estimated by a group of students from Chalmers University of Technology. Their study (in Swedish) won the best undergraduate thesis prize. They used a new method that converts GPS signal strength data into snow depth. To evaluate the accuracy of the method, they compared their GPS-derived snow depths to manual measurements of snow depth from SMHI, Sweden's Meteorological and Hydrological Institute. As these sites were 1.3 km apart, the agreement between GPS and the hand measurements was excellent (Figures 1 and 2). Both sites showed common characteristics of snowfall, whereby snow depth increases with new snowfall, and then falls off over days to weeks as the snow compacts.