Latest Lake-effect snow Stories
[ Watch the Video ] Predicting the future is always a tricky business -- just watch a TV weather report. Weather forecasts have come a long way, but almost every season there's a snowstorm that seems to come out of nowhere, or one that's forecast as 'the big one' that turns out to be a total bust. In the last ten years, scientists have shown that it is possible to detect falling snow and measure surface snowpack information from the vantage point of space. But there remains much that is...
Beginning Jan. 17, NASA will fly an airborne science laboratory above Canadian snowstorms to tackle a difficult challenge facing the upcoming Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) satellite mission -- measuring snowfall from space. GPM is an international satellite mission that will set a new standard for precipitation measurements from space, providing next-generation observations of worldwide rain and snow every three hours. It is also the first mission designed to detect falling snow...
SCHUSS. The term for a straight, downhill ski run. In the land of the Greatest Snow on Earth--Utah--SCHUSS is also the moniker for storm-chasing, Old Man Winter-style. In the Storm Chasing Utah Style Study--SCHUSS--funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), chasing snowstorms is "as exciting as chasing tornadoes," says University of Utah atmospheric scientist Jim Steenburgh, the project's director. He and colleagues are "looking at the guts," Steenburgh says, "of winter storms in...
Doppler-on-Wheels Gives New View of Lake-Effect SnowsIn this winter of heavy snows--with more on the way this week--nature's bull's-eye might be Oswego, N.Y., and the nearby Tug Hill Plateau.There the proximity of the Great Lakes whips wind and snow into high gear. Old Man Winter then blows across New York state, burying cities and towns in snowdrifts several feet high. This season, however, something is standing in his way.The Doppler-on-Wheels (DOW), a data-collecting radar dish, is...
Rising water temperatures are kicking up more powerful winds on Lake Superior, with consequences for currents, biological cycles, pollution and more on the world's largest lake and its smaller brethren.Since 1985, surface water temperatures measured by lake buoys have climbed 1.2 degrees per decade, about 15 percent faster than the air above the lake and twice as fast as warming over nearby land."The lake's thermal budget is very sensitive to the amount of ice cover over the...
By JOHN KEKIS PARISH, N.Y. - Sunshine greeted residents of this snowbound village on Saturday, giving crews a chance to haul away some of the 8 feet of snow that has fallen during the past week. "The sun's out, but it isn't going to last," Mike Avery said as he took a brief break from loading dump trucks with snow to be taken to a pile outside town. The National Weather Service said the bands of lake-effect snow fed by moisture from Lake Ontario would continue weaving up and down...
Latest Lake-effect snow Reference Libraries
The Pacific Northwest low moves on shore typically in or around the Portland and Seattle area. At location A the type of weather that can be seen is usually thunderstorms and higher elevation rain showers form during the summer. This same area will see coastal rains and heavy mountain snows in the winter. When the system arrives at location B, the Rockies, due to topographic enhancement it can produce heavy rain/t-storms in the summer time, while during the winter this same area can see...
The Great lakes have a huge impact in the weather for the cities that are near the lakes. In the fall and early winter months the lakes can create intense snowfall events known as “Lake Effect Snow”. The reason that this occurs has to do with the water temps of the lakes and also the temps of the air that is moving across them. When an Alberta Clipper system forms in Canada and moves Southeastward towards the US, it brings that cold air and strong Northwest winds over the warmer waters....
A very important part of being a meteorologist is to understand the topography of the local region. Mountains can have multiple impacts on the weather forecast. For example: if we look at Seattle we see that to the west is the Cascades and they impact the weather as follows. In the Seattle area precipitation coming in of the Pacific exerts all of its energy into Seattle creating a heavier rainfall potential, while if you travel just to the west of the Cascades the precipitation amount...
The snowbelt is a North American region that lies downwind of the Great lakes, where heavy snowfall is common on mostly the eastern and southern shores of the Great Lakes. Lake-effect snow is caused by cold air picking up moisture while crossing the lake and then releasing it as snow when the air cools over land. Throughout much of the winter, lakes produce lake-effect snow and continuously cloudy skies. This phenomenon continues as long as the air temperature is colder than the water...
