While the lake, or any other sufficiently large body of water, for that matter, provides moisture to aid in the development of lake-effect snow, additional moisture is sometimes required if the wind speeds are strong. From the Porcupine Mountains and the Keweenaw Peninsula to Whitefish Point, snowfall is dramatically enhanced by lake effects. More accurately, lake-effect snow is produced during cooler atmospheric conditions when a cold air mass moves across long expanses of warmer lake water, warming the lower layer of air which picks up water vapor from the lake, rises up through the colder air above, freezes and is deposited on the leeward (downwind) shores. Lake effect snowstorms occur in only three pl aces in the world: the Great Lakes, the east shore of Hudson Bay and along the west coasts of the Japanese islands of Honshu and Hokkaido. Lake Michigan Snowbelt. By the time the flakes stopped falling, storms had dropped more than 2 feet (0.6 meters) of snow on several towns, including Carthage and Croghan. The Lake Superior lake effect snowbelt in Michigan's Upper Peninsula: A very large snowbelt in the United States exists on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, near the cities of Houghton, Marquette, and Munising.
A True Mountain Sled for Anyone All new from... Syracuse, New York, receives significant lake-effect snow from Lake Ontario, averaging 116 inches (294 cm) of snow per year. Lake effect snow events can be quick, or they can last for days, with some of the most incredible snowfall rates and totals possible.
Lake effect snow is created when a large temperature gradient exists between the surface of the Great Lakes and the temperature at 5000 feet above the ground. These areas average 250–300 inches (635–762 cm) of snow each season. Firstly, the open ice-free liquid surface area of the lake shrinks. On February 27-29, lake-effect snow buried upstate New York. A temperature difference of 13 °C (23 °F) (or as past researchers have estimated: between 15 °C and 25 °C) between the lake temperature and the height in the atmosphere (~1,500 meters or 4,921 feet at which barometric pressure measures 850 millibars (85 kilopascals)) provides for absolute instability and allows vigorous heat and moisture transportation vertically. The 2021 Arctic Cat BLAST models are far more... The opposite is true if the upstream moisture has a high relative humidity, allowing lake effect condensation, cloud and precipitation to form more readily and in a greater quantity.Any large body of water upwind will impact lake-effect precipitation to the lee of a downwind lake by adding moisture or pre-existing lake-effect bands, which can re-intensify over the downwind lake.
Because Southwestern Ontario is surrounded by water on three sides, many parts of Southwestern and Central Ontario get a large part of their winter snow from lake-effect snow.Lake Superior has its own independent snowbelts, affecting Similar snowfall can occur near large inland bays, where it is known as bay-effect snow. Once frozen, lake-effect snow over land to the east and south of Lake Erie is temporarily alleviated.
As winds pass over Lake Michigan and generate snow, areas near Traverse City, Muskegon, Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, South Bend, and Elkhart can experience significant, often disruptive, lake-effect snowstorms. Generally, the larger the fetch the more precipitation that will be produced. Western Michigan, Northwestern Lower Michigan, and Northern Indiana can experience heavy lake-effect snow. Sometimes the snow is lighter and distributed across a wider area, like in the image above . Lake Erie produces a lake effect zone stretching from the eastern suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio to Buffalo, New York. That is the beauty of lake effect snow – it can happen with a cold wind (and other factors) instead of having to wait for a low pressure system to pass.
These include areas south and east of the Great Lakes, the west coasts of northern Japan, the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia, and areas near the Great Salt Lake, Black Sea, Caspian Sea, Baltic Sea, and parts of the northern Atlantic Ocean.