New Hampshire Nature Notes
by Eric Orff

Green fields under a gray sullen sky in the south and snow

Friday 12/03/2004

The snow/no snow line is so close today. As I headed East this morning across route 4 to my office in Durham radio station WOKQ continually alerted drivers to the ice road conditions just two towns north of my route. This got me thinking about the rain/snow line in New Hampshire that I have watched for years.

For me global warming is a reality because I have watched it happen. Growing up in Londonderry in the early 1960's there was lots of snow across the whole state winter after winter. The snow line was somewhere down in central Massachustetts. We got plenty of snow, every winter, through the 1960's.

By the mid 1970's the snow line for most of the winter was right along the New Hampshire/Massachusetts border. Drive south a half hour and there was bare ground. Not every winter but most and for a good part of the winter.

Now it seems that the snow/no snow line has moved north to just about the Lakes region. For sure, go west toward the elevation of the Monadnocks and it is more like the north. But East of the Merrimack River and South of Lake Winnipesaukeee winters the last decade have been more like northern Massachusetts in the 1980's. Winter has crept north in my life time at least 60 or 80 miles in the part of New Hampshire I have lived.

There are certainly some winters that don't follow this trend, but the majority the last decade or more have. And so it is today. For the most part I don't mind being on this side of the line as I get older.