
We’re having a big snowstorm in Colorado today, so I have been discussing with some local colleagues on Twitter how to measure accumulations. I haven’t lived around snow much (til I moved to Colorado last year), so I haven’t done this much before.
@vdotw advised “Measure [with a ruler] at a flat spot, like an outside table.”
Well, okay, we have lots of outside tables at Sun’s Broomfield campus, but they all seem to have accumulated different amounts of snow:

This one (shown at far left in the photo above) had about 5 inches:

This one looked more promising:

And, in fact:

Thirteen inches! (That’s a fourteen-inch ruler.)
So what am I supposed to do here? Take an average?