Is there snow in grenoble in march-april, and what is the weather like?

When looking at weather stations with snow, does precip for the last 6 hours show the precip in snow or rain?

• When looking at weather stations with snow, does precip for the last 6 hours show the precip in snow or rain? If a weather station model shows that it is snowing, will the precipitation for the last 6 hours show the snow in inches, or the water equivalent to the amount of snow?

• Answer:

  The precip sensors show liquid equivalent. They are heated so that whatever falls in converts to liquid first before it's measured. The thing with snow is that it is less likely than rain to fall into the rain gauge if there's any wind at all. So it usually underestimates the liquid equivalent. Meteorologists often take the liquid amount, and use a conversion factor, often 12 to 1 to then report the snowfall amount. So if .5 inches of liquid is found in the sensor, it converts to 6" of snow. The conversion factor may be higher if it's very cold which gives particularly fluffy snow, or the factor may be much lower, as low as 5 to 1 when the temp is close to 32F, for very "wet" snow. At some stations an actual observer will go outside with a measuring stick and measure the snow sitting on the ground. This is sometimes reported too and is generally much more accurate. You can tell if it's liquid equivalent or an actual snow measurement by the number of decimal places to which it's reported. Liquid is given to hundredths of an inch (i.e. 0.76) while snow is reported in tenths of an inch (5.1). I'm not sure what weather station model you are using so I'm not sure what to tell you about that. I suspect they follow the decimal rule I mentioned above, so if you see tenths of an inch, that's probably supposed to be actual snow fluff.