How our snowpack builds

I know this will be old news for some, but I think it's neat to see and educational for others. It is often said we have the best "base" of snow anywhere and the last couple days have shown how that's true and how we build that base. All this data is from the WSDOT Stevens Pass weather station/ SNOTEL site. The first picture shows a plot of snow depth versus snow-water equivalent (SWE = total water, essentially). You can see that even thought snow depth started going down on the 24th, SWE kept going UP, which means that the snow was compacting and absorbing more than melting.
The next day it got too warm and the snow depth plummeted, but SWE only suffered slightly. What likely happened there was a mixture of further compaction, some melting due the warmer winds (warm air melts snow far more effectively than warm water, a counter-intuitive phenomenon that I'm going to pass on explaining here), and draining of water out the bottom of the snow-pack due to over saturation.

You can see the copious cold rain (> 2"), and then copious warmer rain ( > 2") on the next picture, taken directly from NWAC (credit due to Amar though, really). If the weather becomes benign the SWE will probably continue to drop a bit as more water drains out, but the capacity for snow to hold water is IMMENSE. I guess what I'm really trying to point out is that warm air is worse than warm rain, and cold rain just adds density to our snowpack. Many areas of the country get as much snow per year as Stevens Pass, but our rains (and our dense wet snow) allow us to ski to the road much later in the year by densifying our snow pack, which protects it from melting later on.

Here are the links to those webpages, I used pictures in order to preserve the shifting data plots.
www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/nwcc/plot?interval...1&interval=WATERYEAR

www.nwac.us/weatherdata/stevenshwy2/10day/