Is this conversion even right? I found it on google with little explanation. One inch of rain seems minuscule to 10 inches of snow but maybe I have a fundamental misunderstanding of how much one inch of rain actually is. Please help.
In: Chemistry
That sounds about right, assuming the snow is pretty fluffy. When the snow is fluffy, it’s because the snow flakes aren’t all lying perfectly flat and all squished together tightly. Some are tilted, and they have lots of air in between them. Suppose you had a coffee can or milk carton open at the top, and it got filled up (about 10″ high) by falling fluffy snow outside. If you then brought it inside, the snow would melt — but you’d only have about 1″ of water, because the water does NOT have air mixed in with it.
If you’ve never seen lots of fluffy snow, that might be harder to visualize. If you’ve never seen it, let’s try a different situation. Popping popcorn. If you put a small layer of popcorn in the bottom of a pan, it’s only about a quarter of an inch tall. But when you pop it, you might get 8 inches or more of popcorn. That’s because the popped corn now has lots of air mixed into it and also in-between it.
Or think of a piece of soft foam: you can squish it down to a lot thinner, when you squish the air out; fresh snowfall has a lot of air mixed in between the flakes.
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