What Is Lake-Effect Snow?

[DGUtley]

What Is Lake-Effect Snow? - A snowstorm that slammed into Western New York left more than six feet of snow in places. Blame the Great Lakes.

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It’s hard for most people to imagine six feet of snow in one storm, like the Buffalo area saw over the weekend, but such extreme snowfall events occasionally happen along the eastern edges of the Great Lakes. The phenomenon is called “lake-effect snow,” and the lakes play a crucial role. It starts with cold, dry air from Canada. As the bitter cold air sweeps across the relatively warmer Great Lakes, it sucks up more and more moisture that falls as snow.


I’m a climate scientist at UMass Amherst. In the Climate Dynamics course I teach, students often ask how cold, dry air can lead to heavy snowfall. Here’s how that happens. Lake-effect snow is strongly influenced by the differences between the amount of heat and moisture at the lake surface and in the air a few thousand feet above it.



A big contrast creates conditions that help to suck water up from the lake, and thus more snowfall. A difference of 25 degrees Fahrenheit (14 Celsius) or more creates an environment that can fuel heavy snows. This often happens in late fall, when lake water is still warm from summer and cold air starts sweeping down from Canada. More moderate lake-effect snow


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Canadian winds pick up moisture over the Great Lakes, turning it into heavy snowfall on the far shore.


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https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/lake-effect-snow

[Peter1469]

There is a small buffer between the shore and where the real heavy snows hit. When I was at Ft. Drum, I lived 40 minutes (at speed) away at Sackets Harbor. That was within that buffer.

[DGUtley]

I'm in what the weather-people around here call the "secondary snow belt". The winds swirl around down near me dumping their snow, then back over the lake restocking and then dumping it on the east side primary snow belt. Something to do with the wind patterns. We can have 20-30 inches, Cleveland 6 and then the primary snow belt 40.

[Abby08]

When we lived in Utah, we got the lake effect snow from the Great Salt Lake.

We also got something else we weren't aware of.......lake stink.

It seems the Great Salt Lake emits a foul odor certain times of the year, that can be evident even many miles away.......we didn't know what the heck it was, until we asked someone who had lived in Utah his entire life.