# Snow & weather diary

URL: https://pro-weather.com/docs/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](https://pro-weather.com/docs/data-editor) - the sensor-side equivalent
- [Almanac & records](https://pro-weather.com/docs/features/almanac-history)
- [Tabs & panels](https://pro-weather.com/docs/customizing/panels)