Snow accumulation is nature's summation of precipitation, deposition, resuspension, ablation, and subsurface melting processes. Yearly snow accumulation must be seasonally observed and measured in mid latitudes. Chronologies of historic accumulation can be extracted from snow pits and ice cores on high latitude ice sheets. This paper examines the size distribution (frequency of occurrence) of the mass of snow accumulation layers from four divergent meteorological regimes; Mt.Rose Nevada; Sta 1031 NH; GISP site Greenland; and South Pole, Antarctica. The first two are snow course records of slightly less than a century duration; the second two are core stratigraphies of the two thousand uppermost layers. There is a commonality in the frequency of occurrence of mass oflayers among these very different accumulation regimes. The frequency of occurrence, with respect to mass accumulated is log normally distributed at each site. An analysis is presented showing the robustness and transformability of this distribution. Chronologies of median accumulation , the extremes of accumulation, and the geometric standard deviation of accumulation measured at the GISP site are presented. These are compared to some landmarks of the history of European culture.

Discussion is offered, relative to the association of temperature, dew point temperature, wind charactaristics, and precipitation frequency with annual accumulation. An objective method of accumulation comparison is proposed.