Forget the wooden ruler — I measured the Blizzard of 2026 with my iPhone

In between lifting 40-pound scoops of heavy white snow, I stepped back to ponder Mother Nature's stunning show of force with the Blizzard of 2026. Then I pulled out my iPhone 17 Pro Max to measure if this really was The Storm of this Century.

Hidden inside your best iPhone, like the remnants of grass under the mountain of snow currently on my front lawn, is the Measure app. Introduced back in 2018 as part of iOS 12, it's an incredibly handy digital measuring system that uses augmented reality and the iPhone Pro's LiDAR sensor to measure all kinds of dimensions.

Why was I suddenly so interested in using Measure? If you don't live on the northeast coast of the US, you could be forgiven for not knowing about Bomb Cyclone Hernandez and the feet of snow dumped on places like New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Boston, and Maine during a bona fide blizzard (a snowstorm with sustained winds of 35mph that reduces visibility to near-zero).

Even just eyeballing it, I assumed I had two feet of snow and drifts that approached 3- to 3.5 feet. Where we shoveled, piles of snow reached 4 and 5 feet high.

However, the iPhone offers me an opportunity to get an accurate reading without carrying around a yardstick or jumping in until I'm almost waist-deep in the white stuff.

How to use Measure

Using Measure, which also includes a level, is easy.

I opened the app and then pointed the camera array at the ground, choosing a spot where we had neatly shoveled down from the top of the snow pile to my sidewalk

Measure automatically detects the ground, and once it's done, you can tap to set a start point for your measurement. After that, I slowly pull the phone up while I watch the measurement appear on screen, rolling out almost like a fabric measuring tape. The current total appears to be midway along the line.

Once I reached the top of a pile, I taped again to capture the measurement. The first one said 19 inches. I then chose a slightly higher plateau and measured out 22 inches.

I could find higher drifts, but I was looking for whatever represented the untouched (or unblown) totals. I think around 20 inches is where we're at.

If you were in this storm's path and want to know just how much snow you got, don't go hunting for a ruler or yardstick. Just unpocket your iPhone, open Measure, and start collecting and sharing your totals.

I'd love to share more tips, butI have to finish digging out...

Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button!

And of course, you can also follow TechRadar on YouTube and TikTok for news, reviews, unboxings in video form, and get regular updates from us on WhatsApp too.