Corn and Wind Slabs on Judah

Location Name: 
Mt. Judah
Region: 
Donner Summit Area
Date and time of observation: 
Sat, 02/22/2014 - 12:00
Location Map: 
United States
39° 17' 45.276" N, 120° 18' 58.5252" W
See map: Google Maps
US


Red Flags: 
Observation made by: Forecaster
Snowpit Observations
More detailed information about the snowpack: 

Photo: 2-3 cm of corn snow on SE-S-SW aspects at 8000 ft as of noon today. This soft surface snow was sitting on top of a thick, refrozen, and very supportable layer of melt freeze snow. We had not seen any signs of wet loose instabilities on these sunny aspects when we left at about 1:30 pm. GPS coordinates attached to this observation match this photo.

Video: ECTN within the hard wind slabs on Wild Flower Ridge (@ 39.307865, -120.318918). I did 5 ECT's near this location. 4 out of 5 were ECTN's or ECTX's and one of them was an ECTP24 Q3 @55 cm down from the surface at the bottom of the wind slab. The snow grains here looked like small .5mm rounds. We did not see any other signs of instability concerning these wind slabs.

6-10 cm of soft cold snow still remained on the surface on northerly aspects between 7800 and 8200 ft. on sheltered areas. Below these elevations the snow surface on the NE-N-NW-W aspects was a frozen crust. By 1:30 pm the surface crust did soften on the W and NW aspects below 7500 ft.  

Snowpack photos: 
Snowpit videos (tests, etc): 

VID 20140222 104840

Weather Observations
Blowing Snow: 
No
Cloud Cover: 
Clear
Air temperature: 
Above Freezing
Wind Speed: 
Calm
Precipitation: 
None
Air temperature trend: 
Warming
Wind Direction: 
Accumulation rate: 
None
More detailed information about the weather: