Snow, rain and temperature normals by weather station

These are the official 1991 to 2020 climate normals from NOAA for 17 stations around our service area. They are station records, not town averages, so each number belongs to the station and elevation named in its row.

What the dataset is

NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information publishes climate normals every ten years. A normal is the 30-year average for a weather station. We kept the stations nearest the places we work and added Tahoe City, California, marked as reference only, because it is the long-record station on the far side of the lake.

The table gives elevation, annual precipitation (rain plus the water in snow), annual snowfall, mean temperature, the average winter low and the average summer high. Where NOAA reports no snowfall for a station, the table says not reported. Incline Village has no precipitation normal on file.

What stands out

• Precipitation is low on the valley floors: Hawthorne 4.15 inches, Yerington 4.58, Fallon 4.77, the Reno airport 7.35 and Carson City 9.34 a year.
• It climbs with elevation. Virginia City at 6,340 feet gets 11.7 inches, Glenbrook on the Tahoe east shore 18.46 at 6,350 feet and Daggett Pass near Kingsbury 21.8 at 7,334 feet. The table spells it Dagget Pass, as NOAA does.
• Snowfall changes inside one metro area. Sparks averages 6.8 inches, the Reno airport 20.9 and the National Weather Service office in north Reno 29.7. Carson City is 14.0, Minden 21.8 and Virginia City 46.4.
• Tahoe City, California, across the lake, shows 179.0 inches of snow a year. No Nevada-side Tahoe station here reports a snowfall normal, so that number is a reference, not a figure for Incline Village or Stateline.
• Summer highs average from 71.5 degrees at Daggett Pass to 91.8 at Hawthorne. Winter lows average from 19.9 at Minden to 27.9 at the Reno office.

Why it matters for trees

Trees on the valley floors live on very little natural water. Most of them are irrigated landscape trees, and when watering lapses they show it. See drought stress and dieback and watering mature trees in the high desert.

Snowfall matters for a different reason. Wet snow that settles on a full crown loads the limbs, and the gap between Sparks and Virginia City is a reminder that snow conditions are set by location, not by region. See storm and snow-load breakage.

Limits of the data

A normal is an average, and a single winter can be far above or below it. Stations sit at one spot, and on the Sierra front the numbers change quickly with elevation, so a town a few miles and a thousand feet from its station can differ. Older round figures for Tahoe and Reno snowfall are not NOAA normals and are not used here.