In these windy conditions, snow tends to blow over the top of a snow gauge, skewing readings by a factor of two or three. The weather station in Barrow records “trace” snowfall around 190 days a year—meaning some snow fell, but not enough to measure accurately. The official record adds up all the trace readings to equal zero, but even a little bit of snow multiplied by 190 could be a significant amount. And no one was able to say exactly where the snow came from—did the same storms bring snowfall north and south of the Brooks Range?—or how much of it melted as opposed to sublimating away into
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