How Much Rain Goes Into 6 Inches Of Snow?

Happy Thanksgiving week! It is looking like some tough sledding/driving for much of the area leading up to turkey day. I apparently jinxed us with a 'white' Thanksgiving with my post last week about it. Sorry. Anyway all this snow talk got me thinking about how much rain goes into 6" of snow. The answer isn't as much as I thought it was going to be. Only about .6 of an inch of rain would go into 6 inches of snow. 

I would have thought over an inch of rain for sure to equal that much snow. But according to several different places I looked for a conversion number I settled on the rule of 10 from Sciencing.com. The National Weather Service came up with 13 to 1, but that 13 number changes with where you are located and the temperature of which the snow is falling in. So to make the math a little bit easier I went 10 to 1 as per Sciencing.dom

Now if you really want to dive into the question of how much rain makes X amount of snow and you want to add temp to the equation things get a little trickier.

"To calculate rain to snow for temperatures between 20 and 27 degrees Fahrenheit, multiply rainfall by 15 instead of 10. For temperatures between 15 and 19 degrees Fahrenheit, multiply rainfall by 20. Between 10 and 14, multiply by 30; between 0 and 9, multiply by 40; between -20 and -1, multiply by 50, and between -40 and -21, multiply by 100" - Sciencing.com

As for the amount we are going to get in our neck of the woods, here's the National Weather Service out of the Twin Cities with their latest track of the storm.