Snow day!

Summary

Unexplainable – "Snow Day!" (March 11, 2026)

Episode Overview

In this episode of Vox’s Unexplainable, host Bird Pinkerton braves a post-blizzard New York to talk to everyday New Yorkers about their snow experiences and snow science mysteries. Armed with their questions, she speaks to snow scientist Jessica Lundquist (Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Washington), who answers listener curiosities about snowflakes, sound, structure, and the environmental role of snow. The episode ultimately explores both what we know and don’t know about snow, revealing its hidden complexities and the mysteries that keep even experts fascinated.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Human Joys & Grumbles of Snow

• [01:12 - 04:11] Bird Pinkerton interviews New Yorkers in Prospect Park post-blizzard:
  • People express delight in the “quilt of snow” and snowman-building, as well as frustrations with shoveling and how snow gets dirty over time.
    • “I just love it. Pro snow. Love it. Except a month from now we still have it.” — Unnamed New Yorker ([03:10])
    • “I love it from a distance...Otherwise, I’d have been in my house.” — Unnamed New Yorker ([03:25])
  • Listeners voice their snow curiosities: why is snow quiet, why do snowflakes differ, and what makes some snow good for snowballs?

2. Snowflake Shapes: A Record of the Atmosphere

• [05:17 – 07:25] What forms a snowflake, and why is each different?
  • Jessica Lundquist explains that snowflakes start around a minuscule dust particle (“condensation nuclei”) and their shape is a record of their temperature and humidity journey.
    • “The snowflake's shape is like a record of the life it’s lived, almost like where it’s been?” — Bird ([06:32])
    • “Yes. So it’s telling you about where it’s been in the cloud and what it’s fallen through and whether it hit another snowflake and how it grew.” — Jessica Lundquist ([06:43])
  • Shoutout to Ken Libbrecht at Caltech, who grows designer snowflakes ([06:54]).

3. Sounds of Snow: Crunchy and Quiet

• [07:26 – 10:24] Why does snow crunch or absorb sound?
  • Freshly fallen snow is like a "fluffy pillow" with lots of air pockets. The "crunch" comes from breaking fragile connections (“sintering”) between snow crystals.
    • “When you crunch it, you’re just demolishing a lot of bridges all at once.” — Bird ([09:28])
    • “Yes.” — Jessica Lundquist ([09:28])
  • Snow absorbs sound best right after new snowfall, due to all those loose air pockets.
    • “So the sound gets kind of muffled by going into all those air pockets in the snow and doesn’t get reflected back to your ear.” — Jessica ([10:05])

4. What Makes Some Snow “Snowman Snow”?

• [10:24 – 12:00] Listener question: Why is some snow perfect for snowballs and some not?
  • The “stickiness” of snow is all about temperature and liquid water.
    • “As you get warmer and you get the biggest change above negative 3 degrees C...you actually get more molecules that are liquid, and that makes it really sticky. You can build good snowballs with warmer snow.” — Jessica ([11:23])

5. How Snow Accumulates on Objects

• [12:00 – 13:34] Why does snow stack on branches and wires?
  • Studies show stickiness and stacking depend on snow’s proximity to melting point and its sintering ability (connection-forming).
    • "...the stickiness per se of snow goes up hugely between negative 3°C and 0°C.” — Jessica ([12:49])

6. The Insulation Magic of Snow

• [13:34 – 15:18] What good does snow do for the environment?
  • Snow acts as insulation, keeping the ground and things under it warmer than above the snowpack—a survival strategy for animals, plants, microbes.
    • “If you’re out in a really cold storm, you could dig yourself a snow fort, bury yourself under the snow—you’ll be warmer.” — Jessica ([14:25])
    • “Often in years with less snow, it’s colder for a lot of plants and animals because they can’t hide under that blanket.” — Jessica ([15:10])

7. Snow Science Mysteries and Water Predictions

• [18:31 – 25:09] Jessica Lundquist’s research: why measuring snow (and thus water supply) in mountains is challenging.
  • Snowpack = “free reservoirs” for dry western states, but measuring how much water is stored is tricky due to terrain and snow variability.
    • “So people always want to know—how much water exactly do we have in a snowpack? Because it’s actually so dry out here that people will be told, don’t plant...So a lot of what I try to do is figure out how much snow there is in the mountains at any given point in time.” — Jessica ([19:34])
  • “Snow pillows” measure snow’s weight to estimate water content, but measurements can vary drastically just a few steps away.
    • “If you walk 10 steps to the left, you’re gonna measure something completely different.” — Jessica ([21:45])
  • Satellite data is imperfect; predictions are patchy. Water resource forecasts can miss the mark, especially in dry years, leading to economic consequences.
    • “Colorado River...since 2000, the amount of water in the river was less than what the snow predicted. And 2021 was a particularly bad year...for some people, economic disaster, to get this forecast wrong.” — Jessica ([22:43])
  • Climate change means more rain, less snow—undermining predictability.
    • “Snow itself, by virtue of just storing the water on the hillside, gives you a lot of predictability that we don’t have when it falls as rain instead of snow.” — Jessica ([25:04])

8. Magical Snow Memories

• [25:20 – 26:46] Jessica recounts her favorite snow memory of startling a flock of ptarmigan while skiing in the Colorado Rockies.
  • “All of a sudden the snow erupted and a whole flock of white birds flew out of the snow right in front of me and all around me. It was like the snow erupted birds. I mean, it was beautiful.” — Jessica ([26:20])
  • She is still hoping for a video of ptarmigan “erupting from snow.” ([26:36])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “The snowflake’s shape is like a record of the life it’s lived...?” — Bird ([06:32])
• “This is cooler than feathers because snow is always close to its melting point...So snowflakes will do something we call sintering.” — Jessica ([08:17])
• “If you’re out in a really cold storm, you could dig yourself a snow fort, bury yourself under the snow—you’ll be warmer.” — Jessica ([14:25])
• “In terms of value of snow: it’s like free reservoirs, right? It’s storing that water in the winter for the summer.” — Jessica ([19:34])
• “Snow itself, by virtue of just storing the water on the hillside, gives you a lot of predictability that we don’t have when it falls as rain instead of snow.” — Jessica ([25:04])
• “All of a sudden the snow erupted and a whole flock of white birds flew out of the snow right in front of me and all around me. It was like the snow erupted birds. I mean, it was beautiful.” — Jessica ([26:20])

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Important Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment Description | |------------|--------------------------------------------------------| | 01:12 | Bird heads out in the snow, interviews park-goers | | 05:17 | Bird’s conversation with Jessica begins | | 05:32 | Why snowflakes all have different shapes | | 07:26 | Why does snow crunch? Why/how does it absorb sound? | | 10:24 | What makes snow sticky/fluffy/good for snowballs? | | 12:00 | How snow sticks/accumulates on surfaces | | 13:34 | Environmental benefits of snow, insulation | | 18:31 | Jessica talks about her passion for studying snow | | 19:34 | Why snowmelt matters for water supply | | 21:35 | Measuring snow: snow pillows and their challenges | | 22:43 | Water forecast failures — economic impacts | | 24:12 | Climate change’s effects on snow prediction | | 25:20 | Jessica’s favorite snow memory: ptarmigan eruption | | 26:46 | Jessica seeks ptarmigan video evidence |

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Tone & Style

The episode blends wonder, curiosity, and the everyday joys and annoyances of snow. Bird’s open, conversational style makes complex science accessible. Jessica’s explanations are clear, playful, and informed by enthusiasm and field experience. There’s space for magical moments and admissions of mystery, in true Unexplainable fashion.

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Closing

The episode closes with an invitation to listeners: Send in your own videos of birds (or animals) erupting from the snow and, teasingly, snake questions for an upcoming episode.

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For more about Jessica Lundquist’s research, visit the University of Washington’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Got a video of ptarmigan erupting from snow? Email [e-mail]!

Transcript

[Bird Pinkerton]

Support for the show comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude. They say that Claude is the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow. So for developers that looks like Claude code, it runs in your terminal, reads your code base, and can apparently take on things like writing tests, refactoring, or debugging without you hand holding it. Through every step, Anthropic committed to not running ads in Claude. So when you are deep in something that matters to you, they say the answer you get is shaped by your question, not by an advertiser's agenda. Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at Claude. AI unexplainable Adobe Acrobat, your new foundation.

[Jessica Lundquist]

Use PDF spaces to generate a presentation. Grab your docs, your permits, your moves, AI levels up, your pitch, gets it in a groove. Choose a template with your timeless cool. Come on now, let's flex those two

[Advertisement Voice]

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[Jessica Lundquist]

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[Advertisement Voice]

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[Bird Pinkerton]

All right, it is the day after a very intense snowstorm here in New York City. And my editor Joanna came up with the idea that I should go outside and talk to people about the snow. So I am looking out at what can only be described as a winter wonderland. Everything is truly covered. It's like not a blanket. This is, it's covered in a quilt of snow. It's like fluffy and white and charming and cold. I don't want to go outside. Oh, it's so windy. Hear that? All right, let's go. A few weeks ago, I had an extremely nice time wandering around the streets of Brooklyn in Prospect park and talking to people about the snow.

[Jessica Lundquist]

I can say this park, it's beautiful. It has a lot of trees and all of the trees are really snowy. I can see a lot of snowmans. There's a huge snowman over there. Like I don't know how to say it in feet, but I can say it's at least 160 centimeters. We realized this morning that this was the best snowman making snow that I've ever seen. And so we made this snowman this morning. Now we're back to give it a personality. Is that about sum it up? Help.

[Advertisement Voice]

Help.

[Bird Pinkerton]

What, you're back to sleep? Well, we already built a snowman and we frolicked in the park.

[Jessica Lundquist]

So now we're gonna go get some hot cocoa.

[Bird Pinkerton]

I talked to people who were shoveling their walkways, going sledding, Going skiing. I am wearing my cross country skis from high school. How are you fitting cos country skis in your New York apartment? That's a great question. I talk to people with lots of thoughts on snow. I love working out. I love shoveling it. I cross country ski. I just love it. Pro snow. Love it. Except a month from now we still have it.

[Jessica Lundquist]

And it's black. Yeah.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Like, once it gets disgusting like the

[Jessica Lundquist]

last snow did, then I'm over it.

[Bird Pinkerton]

But I like this snow for right now.

[Jessica Lundquist]

I love it from a distance. Only because he's small way out here. Other than that, I'd have been in my house.

[Bird Pinkerton]

But I do love it from a distance, though. And I also asked people if they had questions about snow. Well, I know that it makes things very quiet because it absorbs sound, but

[Advertisement Voice]

I don't understand, I guess I don't know the science behind why I did hear.

[Jessica Lundquist]

I'm not sure if it's true that, like, every snowflake is different.

[Bird Pinkerton]

I guess one question would be sometimes when snow falls, like, you can't really make snowballs out of it. And then sometimes it's perfect like this where you can, you know, you can grab it and make a snowball. I mean.

[Jessica Lundquist]

Yeah, Just kind of what determines that? Because this feels like a totally different ball game.

[Bird Pinkerton]

So not everyone had questions for me. Not really.

[Advertisement Voice]

I kind of like not knowing. Like not knowing how things.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Yeah.

[Advertisement Voice]

You know what I mean?

[Bird Pinkerton]

Okay, great. I'll go home. That's not what I meant. I did get enough questions that I decided to call up a snow scientist in search of some answers. So I am Bird Pinkerton, and today on the show, I'm talking to Jessica Lundquist. She's a professor of civil and environmental engineering, and she's going to answer a whole bunch of questions about snow for us. Of course, this is unexplainable, though. So a little later in the show, she's also going to tell us some things about snow that she does not yet know and is still trying to figure out. All right, well, I have a bunch of questions for you as our resident snow expert. I guess.

[Jessica Lundquist]

Let's go.

[Bird Pinkerton]

So the first question I got from a few people is actually about the shape of snowflakes. How was it formed?

[Jessica Lundquist]

How does design come about?

[Bird Pinkerton]

Like, is there anything that makes it have a different shape? The snowflake? Why are snowflakes all different shapes?

[Jessica Lundquist]

So snowflakes will form around a tiny speck of dust called a condensation nuclei.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Okay.

[Jessica Lundquist]

But now it can grow in different Ways So you can grow out to make what we call a dendrite shape. So that's your postcard snowflake, but it could also grow down. Right. So you could also get a column. Which one of these you get will depend actually on the temperature and water vapor content in the atmosphere where the snowflake is being formed. Depending on the conditions in the atmosphere, it will grow in a certain way, and then it's not sitting at just one point in the atmosphere. It's often like being blown up and down to different points with different amounts of water vapor, different temperatures. And so it's often like, growing differently throughout its lifetime and then has to fall from that cloud down to where we are at the surface. And it will often, like, hit different snowflakes, and then they can aggregate, and you can get these sort of messy, big things.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Wait, so what you're saying to me is like, the snowflake's shape is like a record of the life it's lived, Almost like where it's been?

[Jessica Lundquist]

Yes. So it's telling you about where it's been in the cloud and what it's fallen through and whether it hit another snowflake and how it grew. And if you really want to know about snowflakes, I recommend checking out Ken Liebericht, who grows them in his lab at Caltech. He can make designer snowflakes.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Every day, I learn about a job that I wish I had. Okay, so the answer to this first question of sort of like, why is every snowflake different? Is like, every snowflake has its own little individual path through the atmosphere that shapes how it grows. And then also go check out this guy's designer snowflake lab.

[Jessica Lundquist]

Yes.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Question two is I got a question kind of about not how it looks, but how it sounds. So one of the people I met did sort of like an ASMR demonstration of the snow crunching. And then was asking, like, why does it crunch like that?

[Jessica Lundquist]

So you talked about the snow, snowflakes history in the atmosphere. Right. But then the snow also falls on the ground and has a history on the ground. So your snowflakes start accumulating on the ground, and you have all these, you know, little individual snowflakes that fall on top of each other, and they have air in between them. It's not ice. It's a pile of little snow crystals with air in between it, like a fluffy pillow.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Almost the way that your pillow is like a bunch of feathers, except this

[Jessica Lundquist]

is cooler than feathers because snow is always close to its melting Point. So if you think about some arterial science, if you have, like, metal and you heat it up so you can weld it and center it. If you get your metal really close to its melting point, you can, like, make two points of metal actually attached to each other. So snowflakes will do something we call centering. So you also center things with metal, but snow will center by itself, just sitting there. So your snowflakes fell down. They made, you know, kind of like your feather pillow with air inside, and then your little crystals start attaching themselves to each other. So now you have this matrix of snowflakes that are attached to each other, and then underneath it, they have air you could also have right at the surface. It might melt and refreeze a little bit. So they'll often be, you know, attached at the surface with air underneath. Now your crunchy sound is you're breaking that.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Oh, you're breaking the connections that they formed.

[Jessica Lundquist]

Yeah, but it's only sometimes your snow won't always make a crunchy noise.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Okay, so basically, like, because snow is slightly melted almost, but it has the power to stick together, it's forming all these sort of fragile bridges.

[Jessica Lundquist]

Yes.

[Bird Pinkerton]

And when you crunch it, you're just demolishing a lot of bridges all at the same time. Yes. Great. Another sound question. This is question three. Why does snow absorb sound?

[Jessica Lundquist]

Okay. And this, it doesn't always do that either. So one thing is, snowflakes are all different. The snow on the ground is also all different. So sometimes it might make a crunching sound, and sometimes it might absorb sound. So when it most absorbs sound is right after new snowfall. So it hasn't yet had time to make all these sintering connections. You just have a whole bunch of little snowflakes just loosely lying at surface. So think of kind of like your feather pillow, not yet attached, but lots of air in between it. So the sound gets kind of muffled by going into all those air pockets in the snow and doesn't get reflected back to your ear. So it ends up sort of being a sound absorber because it's just loosely connected. A whole bunch of air pockets.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Delightful. Okay, so then I got a lot of questions about why the snow is the way that it is. So people were talking about sort of like the texture of the snow in this storm versus the one two weeks ago. It seems like thicker and stickier and, like, the fluffiness. What makes it so fluffy? One person got really descriptive.

[Advertisement Voice]

It's like, AI snow.

[Jessica Lundquist]

What do you mean?

[Advertisement Voice]

Like, I feel like it was 3D printed.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Yeah.

[Advertisement Voice]

Like Tempur Pedic snow.

[Bird Pinkerton]

But it was apparently, like, better for snowballs, better for snow building.

[Jessica Lundquist]

Yes.

[Bird Pinkerton]

And people wanted to know, like, what was going on there, essentially, like, physically, chemically, whatever, to make different snows after different storms.

[Jessica Lundquist]

Yes. So again, we talked about the history, right? It starts with their falling through the atmosphere. They fell through different atmospheres, Warmer storms, cooler storms, depending on the conditions in the atmosphere. Snow crystals grow differently and they also have different amounts of liquid water inside of them. So if you get a colder storm, you have a lot less liquid water and you end up with dry snow. It won't make a snowball. Right. So as you get warmer and you get the biggest change above negative 3 degrees C. So as you get between. Again, when we talked about snow being really close to its melting point, right? So snow's melting point is about 0 degrees C. And as you get really close to that, you actually get more molecules that actually are liquid and that makes it really sticky. You can build good snowballs with warmer snow.

[Bird Pinkerton]

One person asked how it accumulates on surfaces. And so specifically, we were talking about tree branches, and then I was thinking about wires, and I was curious if there's any interesting physics or whatever going on structurally there.

[Jessica Lundquist]

So there are actually these amazing studies done both in Japan and in Switzerland where they put out all these boards of different widths and different sizes, and then they just measured how much snow accumulated on all of them. The pictures in their papers are really cool. And they also did studies where they tried to see, like, how tall could you stack snow and what was the angle of repose of just a stack of snow. So these are questions that lots of people have. Well, maybe not lots of people, but it's definitely been studied quite a bit. It goes back to some of the things we talked about before. So how much snow you can stack up actually depends on the temperature of the snow. So again, we got back to that snow being really close to its melting point, particularly if you have a warmer snowstorm, Right? And the fact that the snowflakes can sit center and stick to each other, so they will actually attach themselves to each other. Also, the stickiness per se of snow goes up hugely between negative 3 degrees C and 0 degrees C. And if you think about, like, little bits of it will, like, melt and be liquid and then refreeze again, that it will sort of freeze itself onto your tree branches and your different things, and then it will attach itself by centering to each other, and so it can stack up amazingly.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Wow. Okay. I'M learning a lot unrelated to structure of things. One person asked what the benefits of snow are for the environment. So like for trees or for parks, et cetera.

[Jessica Lundquist]

Snow insulates things really well. Just like in your house, the insulation is, you know, a lot of pockets of air in between two walls, right? Your snow builds up with a lot of trapped pockets of air that insulate the temperature. So it turns out that in most cold regions, the temperature at the top of the snowpack above the snow is significantly colder than the temperature at the base of the snow. So if you go to the Arctic, it's often like more than 20 degrees Celsius, different between the top and the bottom of the snow. So it'll be, you know, like, can get negative 40 in the air. And if you're under the snow, you're super warm. So if you're out in a really cold storm, you could dig yourself a snow fort, bury yourself under the snow, you'll be warmer. Right? So a lot of animals live under the snow. Some hibernate under the snow. Many build their dens under the snow. Right. It's a warm, safe place through the winter.

[Bird Pinkerton]

And is it just animals or are there other things kind of taking advantage of this warm blanket effect?

[Jessica Lundquist]

Plants, microbes, you know, things in the soil that are using that same insulation to survive. Like plants with shallow roots in cold regions will often have root damage if there's not a good snow year. It's kind of counterintuitive that often in years with less snow, it's colder for a lot of plants and animals because they can't hide under that blanket.

[Bird Pinkerton]

So clearly there is a lot about snow that's no mystery to Jessica. But there are some things Jessica does not know about snow. So after the break, it's snow mysteries with Jessica. Support for the show comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude. If you are the kind of person who goes down a rabbit hole and then stays there, or who keeps pulling at a question until it clicks, they say Claude was built for that kind of thinking. For developers, that looks like Claude code. It runs in your terminal, reads your code base, and can apparently take on things like writing tests, refactoring or debugging without you hand holding it through every step. I texted my friend who uses Claude and told him I was making an ad about Claude and asked why I should use Claude and or Claude code. It's just really good at coding, lol. He said, what does that mean? I said, with it, I can build things. I wouldn't have time for myself or ability for myself in many cases. He said. Nice, I said Anthropic says they are committed to not running ads in Claude. So when you are deep in something that matters to you, they say the answer you get is shaped by your question, not by someone else's advertisement taking you out of the deep work, ready to tackle bigger problems. Try Claude for free at Claude AI Unexplainable and see why some problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner.

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[Jessica Lundquist]

All schools are officially closed for a snow day.

[Bird Pinkerton]

All right, Jessica Lundquist was patiently answering all our questions about snow. But I also had some questions about Jessica. Like what got her into studying snow to begin with. She told me she grew up in California and her favorite thing to do was to go to Yosemite.

[Jessica Lundquist]

I just like going in the mountains and going hiking and I went in the summer, which, you know, generally there's no snow, but then quickly realized that the amount of water in the river that I like to jump in and go swimming was completely related to the amount of snow in the mountains.

[Bird Pinkerton]

So you were like, I'm going To spend a great deal of my career studying this question.

[Jessica Lundquist]

No, of course not. I said, I want to be a park ranger and just go hiking in the mountains.

[Bird Pinkerton]

She did wind up becoming a researcher, though, not a park ranger. And she began tackling this big question related to snow.

[Jessica Lundquist]

How much snow is there actually in the mountains?

[Bird Pinkerton]

It turns out that on the west coast of the US Snowmelt can be an important source of water.

[Jessica Lundquist]

So basically in the Western U.S. we don't have enough water for all the things we want to use water for. There's a lot of people living in the west. There's a lot of crops grown in the West. All of these need water to grow. And basically the water is allocated to people through this water rights system. So in terms of like, what is the value of snow? It's like free reservoirs, right? It's storing that water in the winter for the summer. So people always want to know how much water exactly do we have in a snowpack? Because it's actually so dry out here that people will be told, don't plant. Right? We can't give you water this year. You can't plant your crops. You need to furlough your fields. You need to do something else. So a lot of what I try to do is figure out how much snow there is in the mountains at any given point in time. I mean, the job is often to predict the future, right? Can you predict how much water we'll have in the future?

[Bird Pinkerton]

But this is easier said than done because it's tricky to measure how much snow there is in the mountains.

[Jessica Lundquist]

A lot of snow falls in places that don't have roads, that don't have infrastructure. They're rugged, steep terrain without, you know, a lot of access. So a lot of it fell in place. You can't go. But it also, like, it's extremely variable. So if you put out a measurement site so they. The National Resource Conservation Service, or nrcs, has something that's called a snow pillow. Okay. So it's basically you have like two metal plates, you fill it with antifreeze, you put it right by the surface of the ground, or you bury it slightly so bears can't find it. The snow falls on it, squeezes the water in the antifreeze, which then creates a pressure gradient and it tells you how much, what is the weight of the snow resting on this snow pillow? So basically that weight tells you what we call the snow water equivalent, like for, basically for water resources. If all that snow melts, how much water do we get out of It. This is the snow water equivalent, or you may hear the term swee. Swe. Snow water equivalent.

[Bird Pinkerton]

I have not heard the term swe, but I like the term SWE quite a bit. Okay, that sounds great. That sounds like we have a measurement. Fantastic.

[Jessica Lundquist]

Exactly. But if you walk 10 steps to the left, you're gonna measure something completely different. Oh, right. Okay.

[Bird Pinkerton]

This is somewhat less sweet. The same problem exists for other measurements, and satellite images can be tricky. And so Jessica and researchers like her may never be able to work out a perfect measurement of the snow in the mountains on any given year. What they can work out, though, is patterns. So for many decades now, people have been taking measurements of snow in the mountains at certain spots and then seeing how much water there ends up being in the following warm season. And that means that they can say, you know, when our measurements look like this, in these various spots, there will probably be this amount of water. Emphasis on probably, though, because the predictions are not always as neat and tidy as this makes it sound.

[Jessica Lundquist]

So that's why I'm still employed, so the number of things can trip people up. One thing we did recently. So basically, Colorado, Colorado river, provides water for what, seven different states who all argue about how much water they get and is often in the news as not having enough water. And what they've noticed is since 2000, the amount of water in the river was less than what the Snow predicted. And 2021 was a particularly bad year. They thought from the snowpack, it was kind of close to average. And then it delivered way less stream flow than they thought. And so, you know, then people aren't prepared because they bought their seeds to plant, and then they get the water cut off and they lose their crops. And so it's for some people, economic disaster, to get this forecast wrong.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Jessica says the reason these forecasts were wrong was that it had stopped raining as much in the spring in Colorado.

[Jessica Lundquist]

And so if it is super dry and warm in the spring, after April, after they take that survey, it turns out that the plants wake up early and it's sunny, and they say, okay, I'm going to start using water to grow as a plant, they start transpiring, evaporating, and a lot of that water goes back to the atmosphere instead of in the stream.

[Bird Pinkerton]

So the plants, before it can even get to the stream, the plants near the snow are, like, vacuuming it up in a variety of ways.

[Jessica Lundquist]

Yeah.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Is climate change affecting your predictions at all?

[Jessica Lundquist]

So basically, climate change, warmer temperatures, the biggest impact is that more precipitation falls as rain instead of snow. So now in terms of predictability, rain is fast, right? When it rains, it runs off right away. So the snowpack, what it does is like it actually allows us at this time of year and traditional April 1 snow surveys to say this is how much water is going to be in the rivers in the summer. We actually have no idea how much it's going to rain in May or June in the western US Right now. Like that we can't forecast right? And without the snow, it's that kind of guess of how much will it rain in the future that we have to rely on. So snow itself, by virtue of just storing the water on the hillside, gives you a lot of predictability that we don't have when it falls as rain instead of snow.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Fascinating. All right, easy question to end. Is there a snow that you would revisit from your life that you'd encountered?

[Jessica Lundquist]

Yes. So I did a project. We were studying snow out in Gothic Colorado, sort of by Crested Butte, middle of nowhere, Colorado Rockies. We are staying in this old abandoned mining town that is now a biological research station that you can only access by skiing in. So we've skied in and we're staying in this old mining town and every day we are cross country skiing out to our measurement sites to dig in the snow and measure things. And so we're the only people out there. And it's like snowing really lightly. And I was, I was the front of the line of everybody heading out, just sort of cross country steam on our route. And then all of a sudden, right in front of me, I disturbed a bunch of ptarmigan that were hiding under the snow. So the ptarmigan, especially when it's really light, fluffy snow, they will like bury themselves in the snow. But as I went by them, I scared them. So all of a sudden the snow erupted and a whole thing flock of white birds flew out of the snow right in front of me and all around me. It was like the snow erupted birds. I mean, it was beautiful.

[Bird Pinkerton]

That's so magic.

[Jessica Lundquist]

I keep looking online, like, hasn't someone videotaped this? I can't find a like YouTube recording of like ptarmigan erupting from snow. If you ever find one, you have to send me.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Okay, this is perfect. We had, we brought, we came to you with questions that people had. And now you are leaving our audience with a question that you have, which is, does anyone have videos of a

[Jessica Lundquist]

bunch of cardigan which is erupting from the snow?

[Bird Pinkerton]

Well, I'll let you know if anyone sends us any. Thank you. If you want to read more about Jessica Lundquist's research, you can find her at the University of Washington's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. This episode was produced by Me Bird Pinkerton. It was edited by Joanna Solotaroff. It was also her idea to send me walking through the cold and snow. As one lovely person I spoke to put it, make your editor come out

[Jessica Lundquist]

and do some of this.

[Bird Pinkerton]

I'll let her know. Christian Ayala did the mixing and the sound design. Noam Hassenfeld does our music, Melissa Hirsch checks our facts. Jorge Just, Meredith Hodnot, Julia Longoria, Sally Helm and Amy Padula are the fact that some macaques in Japan have been recorded making balls of snow that they roll down hills. Thanks so much to everyone who gave me their questions and their thoughts on snow. I really appreciate you all. And if you have videos of Ptarmigan bursting from snow, please send them to unexplainableox.com if you have videos of any birds bursting from snow, honestly, or animals bursting from snow, send Those along to unexplainablex.com too please. Also, I had a ton of fun producing this episode, like sort of an irrational amount. And I was thinking I might do another episode about snakes. So if you have snake related questions, please record a voice memo and send it to us. No question is too silly. Just tell us your name, your age, your question about snakes and we might use it on the show. We are, in case you missed it, [e-mail] if you would like to support the show and the journalism that Vox does, we would love it if you would become a member. It is very easy to do. Just go to Vox.com members. You'll get access to all of Vox's journalism, but you'll also know that you are supporting Vox's journalism. And for those of you that have emailed us to let us know that you have signed up because of Unexplainable, as well as those of you who have left us a nice review on your podcast platform or shared unexplainable episodes with people in your life, you are the feeling that you get when you cut a paper snowflake in a weird way and you aren't sure how it's going to look and then you unfold is spectacular. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast network and we will be back soon with another episode about everything that we don't yet know.

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