History

The hexagonal form of snowflakes was first noted by Johannes Kepler in 1611. Robert Hooke revealed the variety of crystalline structures as seen through a microscope in 1665. Similar studies were performed in the mid eighteenth century in France and England. Bentley and Humphries (1931) published a book with over 2,500 illustrations of snowflake photographs showing a variety of snow crystals.

The earliest snow surveys were made at Mt. Rose, Nevada in 1906 by James Church, and by 1909–1910 he was surveying a network of stations. Snow surveys provide an inventory of the total amount of snow covering a drainage basin or a given region. Church also invented the Mt. Rose sampler – a hollow steel tube designed so that each inch of water in the sample weighs 1 ounce (28.35 g). Snow surveying began at locations in several western states between 1919 and 1929 and in the latter year California organized cooperative snow surveys (Stafford, 1959).