Snow & weather diary
Record snow depth and the observations your station cannot measure.
No consumer weather station measures lying snow. A rain gauge that catches snow reports a trickle when it eventually melts, and nothing at all while it sits on the ground - so without a human writing it down, every snowy winter is a gap in your record.
The diary is where you write it down. Snow depth is the headline; the classic observer flags and a free-text note ride along, because they are the same act: looking out of the window and recording what the hardware cannot.
What you can record
Open Diary on your site's dashboard and pick a day:
| Field | What it means |
|---|---|
| Snow depth | Lying snow when you looked. |
| New snow, 24 h | How much fell, not how much is left. |
| Thunder / Hail / Fog / Gales | Observed that day. |
| Note | Anything else - up to 1000 characters. |
Snow is entered in your site's own units (centimetres on a metric site, inches on an imperial one) and stored in a single canonical unit, so switching your site's units re-reads your whole diary rather than reinterpreting it.
Clearing an entry removes it
Emptying every field and saving deletes the day rather than storing a row that says nothing. There is no separate delete step to remember - though the list of recent entries has a remove button too.
What visitors see
Once you have written at least one entry, a Diary tab appears on your public site with the last twelve months:
- Deepest snow over the window, and the day it was on the ground - not the most recent depth, which is usually the day the last of it melted.
- Total snowfall across the window.
- How many days carried each of thunder, hail, fog and gales.
- Every entry, newest first, with its snow figures, flags and note.
The tab is absent until there is something in it, so a site that never writes an entry never grows an empty tab.
Days are your station's days
The diary's days are your station's local calendar days - the same ones the charts, the almanac and the climate reports use. If your station is in a different timezone from you, "today" in the diary is the station's today.
What is deliberately not here
- No hardware snow sensor. Laser distance sensors exist, but the push protocols have no agreed field for one, so there is nothing reliable to read. The diary is the snow record.
- No backdated bulk import. Entries are added a day at a time.
- Snow is not in the almanac records or the climate reports. Those are built from the sensor archive; the diary is a separate, human record and is kept visibly separate.
Next steps
- Correct a bad reading - the sensor-side equivalent
- Almanac & records
- Tabs & panels