Snow water equivalent (SNOTEL): methodology

Snow water equivalent (SWE) in inches at USDA NRCS SNOTEL stations, from the Air and Water Database (AWDB). SWE is the depth of water you would get by melting the snowpack at the station — the number that matters for runoff, rather than snow depth.

One station, not a county. Each series is a single automated site, identified by its station triplet. We record the county the station sits in so the series can be found from a county page, but the value describes that site only. Nevada's stations are clustered in the north-east and in the ranges above Las Vegas; nine of the seventeen counties have no station at all, and a county with one station has one data point standing in for its entire snowpack.

The monthly value is the end of the month, not the month's average. AWDB's monthly aggregate for SWE is the value on the last day of the month. For April 2025 at Bear Creek that is 9.3 inches, while the mean of that month's daily readings is 16.1 and the peak is 20.9 — the snowpack melted through April. Averaging these monthly figures does not give you an average snowpack, and the seasonal peak usually falls between two month-ends and so never appears here. Use the daily AWDB series if you need either.

Zero is a real reading. A snow-free station in August reports 0.0, which is data; a station that did not report has no row.

Flags. AWDB marks values provisional until approved, and marks some as edited or suspect. We carry those through as preliminary, estimated and suspect rather than dropping or silently accepting them.