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MARK STEIL: The unbroken sweep of hardpacked snow in Southwest Minnesota holds secrets. Everyone knows there's a lot of snow. But National Weather Service hydrologist Mike Gillespie wants to know how much water it contains.

MIKE GILLESPIE: Stick a ruler in there. She's showing about 15, 16 inches in here. I would imagine you're looking at probably 3.5 inches of water in this 16 inches of snow.

MARK STEIL: Gillespie takes core samples of snow and weighs them to measure moisture. Some have yielded nearly 5 inches of water. He'll take about 100 samples in Southwest Minnesota, Eastern South Dakota, and Northwest Iowa. The information he and other hydrologists collect go to river forecast centers where it's used to predict spring flood potential.

MIKE GILLESPIE: We'll simulate the melt of this snow using different scenarios and convert this snow into a liquid. So we need to know how much liquid there is in here that is going to melt, soak in, run off all those things. So basically, we're turning six months of snowfall into a week or two weeks of rainfall.

MARK STEIL: Gillespie's travels take him past farms where towering snow drifts lap at the eaves of barn and house roofs. Dairy farmer Bruce Peterson looks out a kitchen window, but he can't see his barn anymore adrift 25 feet high blocks the familiar view.

BRUCE PETERSON: Kind of bugs us after a while, you get kind of-- you feel kind of shut in or claustrophobic, I guess. But yeah, it's big and it's been building, and it builds with every other little wind to a sand dune, I guess.

MARK STEIL: The Cottonwood County farmer says he's too busy keeping up with winter to think much about spring and what the big melt might bring. One event he revisits often took place in January. He was on the barn roof secured by a safety rope, shoveling snow off the building.

BRUCE PETERSON: I imagine it was 10, 15 minutes of shoveling. I happened to look east across the major part of the snow and looked up and the middle of the barn just started falling in. And I just went down the south side of the roof with my rope and trying to get away from it because it looked-- it looked bad. And it was just a loud roar.

MARK STEIL: The rope held and stopped Peterson's slide near the edge of an uncollapsed portion of the roof. Peterson rebuilt the barn and managed to keep milking his cows. Still, the winter cost money, and he wants good crops this summer to help make up the loss. He believes the mountains of snow may actually help him do that. Most winters, the ground freezes several feet deep. When spring comes, this frost prevents soil from absorbing snow melt. Peterson says, this year's deep snow has insulated the ground so well, the soil is barely frozen.

BRUCE PETERSON: So if there isn't a lot of frost and we start getting these drifts to melt down and there's not a lot of frost underneath the drifts, hopefully the water will start going down into the ground right away.

MARK STEIL: Peterson hopes that will limit spring flooding and improve his harvest prospects by helping get crops planted on time. In the town of Springfield, Clarence Wenisch shovels scraps of ice off his mostly bare driveway. Less than 50 feet away, Wenisch's yard ends in a snow covered bulge 6 feet high.

CLARENCE WENISCH: It's the deck they put in here a few years ago-- quite a few years ago, really.

MARK STEIL: The dike stands between his home and the Cottonwood River. High water has forced the Wenisch's out of their house four times, most recently 1993. Loretta Wenisch says this has been a bad winter.

LORETTA WENISCH: It looks like we probably will have a flood, but we're used to that. We go out to our son's farm, right by Morgan, and stay until we can get back in the house again.

MARK STEIL: About 10 miles from the Wenisch home, weather service hydrologist Mike Gillespie stops near a cornfield to take another snow sample. He digs through a crust packed hard by blizzard winds, past a thin layer of ice left by a January thaw, through fluffy December's snow, ending at a thick layer of ice from November's freezing rainstorms.

MIKE GILLESPIE: If it melts in two days, that's trouble. But if it melts over a two week period, it shouldn't be too bad.

MARK STEIL: The heavy snow cover in Western Minnesota and the Eastern Dakotas is well positioned to cause trouble. The area contains the headwaters of several major rivers, including the Minnesota, Red, and Big Sioux. Gillespie says, the best temperature recipe for a flood free spring is a long string of above freezing days and below freezing nights. This is Mark Steil, Mainstreet Radio.