I know down here the frost is still not out when we started excavation yesterday.
Frost may not be all the way out yet, but it's getting pretty deep all across ND.
https://www.ndawn.ndsu.nodak.edu/deep-soil-temperatures.html
I love having this data available to us nowadays, 10 years ago there were like 2 or 3 soil temp profiles in the entire state. Now we are starting to get some pretty good density of data.
FWIW, 20 inches of thawed out soil can easily hold 4 inches of water with an average porosity of 20-25%, and that's using a fairly low expectation for soil porosity in ND. Locally, it can easily be roughly twice that. And that's what leads a person to the conclusion of there is plenty of storage capacity in the soil, so it becomes a non-simple math problem of rain rates + melt rates - infiltration rates (via hydraulic conductivities for said soils) equals expected runoff.
And to db-2, yes. That is a common observation this year and we rarely see much runoff from soil induced melting of the snow and ice. It's just too slow overall. Maybe on a really nice sunny day in the spring will you see an inch or so of snow-water equivalent converted from snow to liquid water. Rainfall though, especially in a thunderstorm can easily exceed a rate of 2-3 inches per hour. That's when you see a lot of runoff because the rainfall rate has greatly exceeded the infiltration rate (not overall capacity) of the soil. So long as the drainages are clear, that water gets in motion and generally stays in motion.
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At least we will have company with the unpleasant weather theme.
https://twitter.com/NWSReno/status/1516767775968174094/photo/2
Good for them, they need it as well.