First storm

We finally had a significant snow storm!  No more whining kids asking, "When will it ever snow?"  Now we have three days of sledding and snowball making and snowman destroying in the books!

We are a storm family.  We spend pretty much any daylight hours (and many evening hours as well) outside experiencing the storm.  Before the snow started we ran out to the store for some last minute supplies: eggs, bread, and a new battery for the anemometer!  Throughout the storm we took wind speed readings from our driveway.  Since our house is tucked into the woods we typically observe far lower wind speeds that are reported for our town.  In fact, many new channels send reporters to our town beach and broadcast about wind and coastal flooding on the Cape.  While watching news coverage the day after the storm we noticed a weather report on national news from Sandwich, MA!

I used the myObservatory app to record snow fall totals around my yard.  I used the freeform sample method to collect my data.  The reason I did this was that most of my yard was trampled during the storm by three dogs two boys and an excited storm-loving husband.  There were few sections of the yard the morning after where the snow had not been trampled.  Using the freeform sampling campaign tool I was able to move around the yard to sections that appeared unspoiled to take depth measurements.

Nothing is more fun than involving the boys in data collection!  Will had a great time finding untouched spots in the yard and even practiced reading the measuring stick.  In our family, data collection is a family affair.  But it doesn't stop with data collection...we also love data analysis.  A typical evening is my husband and I playing with kids outside and diagramming spreadsheets on the garage floor with sidewalk chalk :) 

Tune in soon to hear about the data curation and publishing process and what we can see when we use the myObservatory desktop version to view our snowfall data!