By JESSICA GRESKO and DAVID DISHNEAU, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Measuring snowfall may not be as simple as it sounds.

Over the weekend, as a blizzard pounded the East Coast, a suspiciously low snowfall total came from a prominent place: Reagan National Airport just outside Washington.

While most readings in Washington neared 2 feet, the airport topped out at just 17.8 inches. So what happened? According to one report, weather professionals lost a wooden board they use to measure snow. But it may also just be warmer at Reagan.

A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration spokeswoman says officials will launch a review of snow-measurement procedures to find out what happened.

"Questions were raised about the reading, and we want to better understand what happened and why," NOAA spokeswoman Susan Buchanan said in an email Monday.

The federal agency oversees the National Weather Service, which trains volunteers to calculate snowfall amounts in places where professionals don't do it. Major airport weather stations are professionally maintained, primarily through the weather service or the Federal Aviation Administration.

Chris Strong, a weather service meteorologist at the office adjacent to Washington Dulles International Airport, said the instrument used for snow accumulation measurements is a 2-by-2-foot, white wooden board that sits on the ground. Every six hours, someone measures the snow that's accumulated on the board and then wipes it off. Those are then added together to get a total measurement.

Strong says his office has an orange, square flag that sits next to the board.

"You have to mark it so you don't lose it in the snow," he said.

The Washington Post reported that the Reagan airport weather observers were FAA contractors who lost their wooden snowboard in the blizzard.

Buchanan, the NOAA spokeswoman, wouldn't talk about the report said snow observations are measured at airports "with the primary goal of supporting safe aviation."

"National is the closest airport to downtown DC, and that station provides us with more than 70 years of uninterrupted climate data," she wrote.

Other amounts in the District ranged from 21 inches reported by a weather service employee in the city's Adams Morgan neighborhood, to 26 at the Dalecarlia Reservoir, near the Maryland border at the Potomac River. That reading came from a weather observer trained by the weather service.

The 22 inches at the White House, 3 miles from the airport, was reported by the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network, a nonprofit, volunteer outfit sponsored partly by NOAA.

That group was trained by retired weather service climatologist Robert Leffler, who has long argued that Reagan National's climate isn't representative of the District as a whole.

"It's not that the data's bad. The data's good for aircraft observation," he said. But "I always say, 'Not many people live, work or grow their food on an airport runway.'"