How much of snowfalls finally goes into the soil?

Question

How much of snowfalls finally goes into the soil?

Answer 1

That depends how on saturated the underlying ground is, how deep the snowpack is, and how quickly the melt occurs.  Much of the snow melts and flows into streams and rivers.

Answer 2

The amount of precipitation that goes into the ground varies a lot and depends on the soil and other factors.  On an annual basis, a range of 10-25 % of the precipitation is typical for most places.  The rest is runoff and evaporation.  Obviously sandy soil will be a lot better at taking in water than clay soil.

It is really hard to get good numbers for this stuff because it is just too hard to measure everything that needs to be measured to come up with decent estimates.

Snowmelt is a bit of a special case, because frozen ground tends to resist the infiltration of water from the surface.  Nevertheless, snowmelt is a very important part of the groundwater budget in most places.  Once the ground thaws, there is pretty constant infiltration until all of the snow is gone.