With over 18" of snow on the ground, my thoughts have been concentrated on what the golf course is going to look like once all this snow starts to melt.
Snow water equivalent is the amount of liquid water contained in snow. The National Weather Service uses this information to help determine flood potential once thaws occur.
I was curious on what the snow water equivalent of our snow was. This morning, I removed 1 square foot of snow from #2 green and let it melt down. The meltdown resulted in 1.96 gallons of water. This is about what I expected due to the dry powdery consistency of the snow.
The good news is that the snow water equivalent could be much higher than it is. The bad news is that this will still be a huge amount of water to deal with. Below are a few greens with their square footage and how much water we are going to potentially have to deal with on each.
#2 green - 3,250ft2 * 1.96 gal/ft2 = 6,370 gallons of water
#8 green - 4,722ft2 * 1.96 gal/ft2 = 9,255 gallons of water
#16 green - 5,124ft2 * 1.96 gal/ft2 = 10,043 gallons of water
#18 green - 4,011ft2 * 1.96 gal/ft2 = 7,861 gallons of water