Have you ever looked at the Snotel graphs and wanted to compare this year to a certain year but the site only will let you look at this year vs. last year? I have been working on getting a spreadsheet set up that will do just that. You can look at whatever year you want and compare that to this year, or any other year. Some small excel skill required in hiding a certain column is all you need to know. Now granted I have only done this with one site in Utah so far but if people like this I may work on other sites as well. Right now I just did Mammoth Cottonwood because that is the one I look at the most.

Click the link to open file.

97 - 2003 Excel compatible file

Instructions on how to use the file are as follows:

After opening, the first tab up is the “Graph” Tab. Here all the years are shown on the graph from 1980 – 2010.

Next is the “SWE & Accu Data” Tab. (SWE = Snow Water Equivalent, basically how much water is in the snow on the ground. Accu = The accumulated amount of Precipitation fallen for that year. Both given in inches of water.) This is the page where you hide the columns of the years that you do “not” want to see. So if you hide columns B – Y, you hide years 80 – 91. Then you click back on the “Graph” Tab and the graph shows only years 92 – 2010. (Years are the water year so it starts in October of the previous year stated. So year 80 goes from Oct. 1979 – Sept 1980.) You can do this to show any year with any other year all you have to do is hide the corresponding columns to the years. If you do not know how to hide the tabs, just click on the letter of the column you want to hide, right click on the letter and select hide. You can hide multiple ones at once if you hold the Ctrl key while selecting the column you want to hide, and then right click on any letter and select hide. To unhide the columns just select the two columns that the hidden data are between, right click the letter and select unhide. Have fun comparing different years with each other.  

You can also just hold Ctrl and hit “z” to undo what you have done to unhide the columns you have hidden. If for some reason you lose data just close the file without trying to save it and reopen it again.

The next two tabs just show the SWE and Accu on their own sheet with a corresponding graph. Use it the same way as the other tab just described.

The last tab is the “Precip” Tab. This data shows how much Precipitation has fallen for a given day in each year. At the end of the data I have shown some interesting things. First it shows the number of times that precipitation has accumulated on a given day for the last 30 years. The next column calculates the % chance of precipitation for that given day according the last 30 year history. 2010 data is after the % chance just to see how this year stacks up to the chances. The next few columns break the data up into 10 year periods and calculate them for those years. Quite interesting data in my mind.

If you want to take some years out of those equations you have to actually delete the data instead of just hiding it. So click on the column you want to delete corresponding to the year you want to take out and hit the “delete” key. Once you are done looking at that just hold down the Ctrl key and hit “z” and it should come back so long as you don’t do other stuff between this and deleting the data. You can always just close the file and reopen it to get the data back to the original.

ENJOY!

All data was taken from the snotel site http://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/snotel/Utah/utah.html