Even the weather watchers were caught off guard.
Despite her training, volunteer National Weather Service spotter Catherine Stelzer admits she was surprised by the amount of snowfall in her neck of Portland’s Roseway neighborhood.
The 49-year-old recorded a nearly 11-inch-high drift on top of her blue recycling bin Thursday morning.
“I’m not sure where my ice scrapers are, or my snow shovel. I think they’re stuck in the garage, which has so much snow up against it I can’t get it open,” she said.
Tallies from spotters like Stelzer showed a wide variety of accumulations from neighborhood to neighborhood and city to city.
“It was all a matter of who was in the cold air first,” said National Weather Service meteorologist Clinton Rockey.
The official measurement at Portland International Airport hit 10.8 inches of snow Wednesday — the most accumulation since 1943.
But the weather service pulls snowfall tallies from social media posts, the spotter network and even collects data from their own homes, like Rockey’s 9 inches at his home near Mt. Tabor.
[Read the latest Portland weather news here.]
Areas east of Interstate 5 generally reported 8 to 11 inches of snow, topping out at about 12 inches in Gresham, Rockey said, citing the latest reports. Downtown accumulated about 7 to 8 inches, while the westside saw 5 to 8 inches in many areas.
South of the city, snowfall levels quickly dropped down to 2 inches or less.
The eastside was hit hardest because the temperature had dropped there first, while the westside had mostly rain until later in the evening.
Rockey said you don’t have to work at a weather station to contribute to accumulation tallies.
The weather service has long relied on volunteers — not only to count rain and snow accumulations, but to observe storms and provide early warnings.
All it takes is the inclination, a few hours of virtual learning and the ability to wield a ruler to join the Skywarn Spotter program.
Lisa Weidman recorded only 2.78 inches overnight at her home in the Dundee Hills neighborhood outside Dayton in Yamhill County, but noted that a few more flakes were falling Thursday morning.
The retired media studies professor said her interest in climate change motivated her to join the Skywarn Spotter program, which has openings for another six sessions of the free online training in March and April.
“Yesterday felt like a lot of waiting around for the snow to arrive,” the 60-year-old said. “I don’t see a lot of media providing forecasts for this hill that I live on, so I thought it would be good to contribute that information.”
Even those who aren’t formally trained spotters can still provide photos and data to the National Weather Service using social media.
Frank Rodriguez measured 8 inches at his Tannasbourne home in Washington County. But there was no snow day for his wife, a Sunnyside Medical Center nurse, so he suited up and helped dust off her car.
Their three daughters had plenty of fun in the snow, then it was time for Rodriguez, a 39-year-old case manager for people with disabilities, to whip up some cups of hot cocoa and turn on a kids movie while he worked from home.
“I noticed a lot of people are actually staying home, which is great,” he said.
After checking the dire forecast on his phone, Gifford’s Flowers co-owner Jesse Kerr closed his downtown shop early Wednesday and made a few last-minute deliveries in Clackamas County, before putting on snow tires and dropping off the last vase in his home stretch of Gresham.
Kerr, who has his own backyard weather station, expected 3 to five 5 inches of snow. He ended up recording more than 10 inches Thursday morning.
“The models that everybody looks at are very, very divergent, and virtually none of them predicted anything close to the snow that we got,” the 43-year-old said. “It was a huge bust. But it was largely something that you could only see once the snow started coming down.”
How much snowfall did you see? Contact our reporter below:
— Zane Sparling; zsparling@oregonian.com; 503-319-7083; @pdxzane
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