Weather Tidbits: Albedo & Snowpack’s Impact on Temperature

This edition of Weather Tidbits discusses albedo, as well as the impact snowpack can have on temperatures. Albedo is the fraction of light that a surface reflects. If it is all reflected, the albedo is equal to 1. If 30% is reflected, the albedo is 0.3. A surface like blacktop, for example, has a very low albedo of under 0.1. 10% of radiation is being reflected while 90% is being absorbed. This is why a blacktop surface heats up very efficiently. Snowpack, however, has a very high albedo at around 0.8-0.9. Meaning, fresh snowpack will reflect 80-90% of all incoming radiation and absorbs only 10%. Very little radiation is used to heat the surface. This limits your overall daytime high temperature potential as well as keeping the nighttime low temperatures colder.