National Weather Service conducts winter snow survey in Cook County

Chuck Olsen | February 13, 2026

WTIP accompanied National Weather Service meteorologist Ketzel Levens and her colleague Steve Gohde on a snow survey on Feb. 6 to help predict spring flood potential along the North Shore.

The deepest snow pack they found was 20″ at Sawbill Lake, averaged from multiple measurements, which is 3.6 inches of snow-water equivalent.

Based upon the snow survey data, the 2026 Spring Flood Outlook says “Spring flooding potential across most of the Northland is normal to below normal based on marginal amounts of snow water and fairly deep frost depths.”

That outlook could change as we head into March, which is why NWS will continue to survey every two weeks.

Find the transcript and audio of our conversation below, and watch a video of the snow survey in action.

Ketzel Levens
My name is Ketzel Levens. My main job is as a general meteorologist at the Weather Service office in Duluth. I’m sure listeners have heard myself and my colleagues on the radio, but what I’m doing today is actually in my role as one of the hydrology program managers at our office.

We don’t have a specific hydrologist position, but we do have a couple folks who have a little bit more knowledge about the hydrology of the area, rivers, things like that. So today we’re out measuring the amount of liquid water that’s currently contained within the snowpack, and that’s going to inform spring flood outlooks, because we need to know how much water is sitting in the snow right now that could potentially melt off and run over land and into rivers.

This started the winter of ’22-’23, that we started doing explicit snow surveys every single winter, and we try to do them two to three times a winter. This is our first measuring of this season, and then we’ll come out every two weeks now until early March.

This actually started in response to the flooding that occurred in the spring of 2022. So if folks remember that, there was a lot of snow on the ground. It had been a pretty cold winter too, so the soil was really frozen, especially on the North Shore, and then also in the Rainy River basin we had a lot of flooding, and in the Rainy it was actually record levels of flooding that occurred there.

That was a combination that spring of pretty deep snowpack that had a fair amount of liquid in it, rain that occurred on top of that snowpack, and then soil that was deeply frozen, so we had really efficient runoff. And in response to that flooding, we provided a lot of support to the various emergency management entities, but in response to that we also recognized that we had serious data gap issues, because we just didn’t know how much water had truly been in that snowpack, especially in these more rural areas.

In response to that, we said, okay, where do we need the observations, and can we go out and get them, or can we recruit other people to do it? So this is a kind of a combination effort of us going out to certain spots, as close to the Boundary Waters as we can get to really sample those rural spots. And then we also tried our best to recruit more citizen observers too, through the CoCoRaHS program, the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network, and they can take these observations as well.

So we’ve got some folks at ranger stations then that can do that, but we also have a bunch of private citizens that are just interested in taking regular observations that really fill in that gap, and especially in Cook County, we have kind of an amazing network for how rural it is, but we’ll always take more. They do an amazing job, I love every single one of them.

WTIP
So you’ve taken some samples today?

Ketzel Levens
Yeah, so we walked out in the prairie area here behind the [Tofte] ranger station, and we have a couple different tools that all kind of do the same thing, and we just like to take multiple observations at each location, and then we run an average. So we’ve got a bunch of different tubes with snow in them right now, essentially.

This tool right here is kind of the best option, so this is the federal snow tube, and it’s a very calibrated piece of aluminum pipe. It has these little teeth here in the bottom, you can see that I dug through a little bit of soil, and then I’ve kind of removed what’s considered the actual soil plug from this already, but there was a little dirt in the bottom.

It’s always good to get the soil plug because then I know that I got the full depth of snow when I took this core, and it also gives me some insight to what the soil properties actually are.

So just how frozen is that soil?

We’ve had some winters where the soil is so frozen that when I go down with these teeth, it’s like I’m hitting asphalt, and I can’t even dig into it, but today we got some soil. It’s definitely on the colder side. I had to work to get into it, and then you can kind of see that there’s this really kind of granular, corny, icy snow here, and it’s compacted quite a bit.

This is calibrated such that every ounce of snow in this tube is equal to an inch of water. What we’ll do is we’ll take cores in all of these different measurements, and then we’ll weigh them, and from that weight we can parse back out how much water is in them. We’re just about 2.95″. That’s what I get for inches of what’s called SWE, Snow Water Equivalent.

Other things that I’m explicitly measuring at each observation spot – the snow water equivalent is kind of the big one that we’re parsing out, and then the other one is just the snow depth. So that’s pretty simple. It’s just inches of snow that are on the ground right now. Basic ruler, we measure to the nearest inch.

Out in the prairie right now, anywhere from like 8 to 14 inches. In the woods, it’s more like 6 to 8. It varies a lot, especially with the amount of wind that we tend to get, so we just use an average.

Snow Depth measurements

Today, we’re going to run around to eight locations. We measured five yesterday over in the Ely area, so we get a pretty good collection. It really fills in the map, and then you add all of the citizen observations to that, and we get a pretty good looking map, and that gives us confidence in the maps that take these numbers, interpolate them across the whole Northland, and that gives us a lot better confidence in our spring flood outlooks.

But it will also work its way into, on the flip side, drought outlooks and the drought monitor. So in years where we might have too little snow, we might be worried about drought conditions going into spring and possible fire weather concerns, so it works its way into all of that as well.

At the end of the day, our forecasts are only as good as the observations we get on the ground. We don’t know what we don’t know out in all of these woods, and so the better we can understand the current environmental setup, the better we can produce forecasts and outlooks and hopefully protect lives and property and give folks a sense of what’s coming.