Lake-Effect Snow

Those of you from lands apart from major bodies of water might hear the term mentioned in the title and scratch your heads about what it means.  Sit in the darkness no longer, for here I shall expose the truth behind the legends in all its furiously frozen glory.

This is actually a pretty clear shot, with the fuzz you see being snow.  Lots of snow.  I drove through this yesterday on that lovely stretch of I-94 between the Indiana border and Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Lake-effect snow, as you can see, is often no fun at all.  It can stop highway traffic dead in its tracks, close even the greediest of chain retailers, and definitively bring out the most pessimistic attitudes in even the most enraptured winter lovers.   Plains folk might go on about their Alberta Clippers and Fargo blizzards, and New-Englanders might bemoan Nor-Easter's, but for sheer snow upon snow, little can beat the power of a Great Lake transferring moisture onto a much colder land mass beside it.  Any resident of Oswego, New York, in fact, can testify how powerful Lake snow can be.  They have experienced five feet in as many hours!  Many nearby cities in Western and Central New York will often compete for a title of the "Golden Snowball", with Buffalo and Syracuse usually getting over-dramatic in competition for the dubious honor.

Where does most of this stuff happen anyway?

Public Domain, courtesy NASA.

Mostly on the western and south-western shores of the Great Lakes.  The western end of Lake Ontario definitely receives more than a fair share of snow, but things are hardly better off on the other lakes, as one can easily see from the image above.  In my personal experience, I would have to say that that western end of Lake Ontario does win the prize for sheer amount in a shockingly rapid time, but for a constant barrage, the northwestern corner of Michigan's lower peninsula, the stretch of shore from the Pennsylvania-Ohio border to southern Buffalo, and above all else, Ontario west of the southern end of Georgian Bay are the places that I have consistently seen buried.  Orillia, Ontario, I would have to say is the most in need of shovels and plows; from November until late March the area is buried in a snow pack worthy of the higher slopes of the Rockies.  The Muskoka lakes to the north of the city get so much snow that gets so densely packed that one can wander out onto their frozen surfaces and think one was walking on ice rather than several feet of snow.

For all the fluff that our lakes can pass on to their terrestrial neighbors, this snow is just that: fluff.  The clouds rapidly lose power as they dump their loads on the land, with few systems making it past 60 miles inland.  The bands are also limited in that they really don't alter existing storm tracks and weather patterns that much. Sure, if a winter storm hits Traverse City or Rochester, it is going to dump both its load and some lake effect on the cities, but the storm will then shed the additional help and move along as intended.  One can easily move north or south out of the bands of snow coming off the lakes and find next to nothing mere miles away from the heaviest falls.  Yesterday I saw no snow cover in Indiana until I was within yards of the Michigan border.  Immediately upon crossing (and thus being east of Lake Michigan) flurries picked up until only a few miles later several feet of snow was covering everything.  One can be in north Buffalo and stare at a brown lawn while one's friends in Lackawanna will be begging for the snow to stop as the fruitlessly shovel out their driveway.  Port Huron today received two inches of snow while Sarnia is covered in a fresh ten inches.

The snows do not always hold to tradition, however.  Bands coming off of Lake Huron have interacted with extremely cold temperatures over the Algonquins and Laurentians and traveled as far away as Quebec and Maine.  Sometimes the wind can blow in the opposite direction and dump on places like Chicago or the parts of metro Detroit west of Lake Saint Clair.  All the necessary ingredients are there, after all.  The lake has yet to freeze, the land is much cooler, and the transfer of water simply takes on a new direction at the whim of the wind.  Lake-effect does not even need the Great Lakes to happen.  Salt Lake City can see a load of snow because of nearby Salt Lake, and back in 1977-1978 during the winter of winters, Tampa even saw "bay-effect" snow as the Gulf of Mexico dumped a load on the city.  We Lakers just happen to see this sort of thing a bit more often, and we gladly accept it in return for amazing summers blessed with natural air-conditioning from our same lakes, along with incredible beaches and sunsets.