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Lake Effect Snow Belts Discussion Thread


TugHillMatt

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Dendrites have been falling here the last 15 minutes. 0.2" so far.

 

Highland Park and Evanston really cashing in.

 

0249 PM SNOW SE HIGHLAND PARK 42.18N 87.81W
02/15/2015 M3.4 INCH LAKE IL TRAINED SPOTTER

SNOW STILL FALLING.

 

0146 PM SNOW EVANSTON 42.05N 87.69W
02/15/2015 M3.0 INCH COOK IL TRAINED SPOTTER

2 INCHES FROM 1000 AM TO 130 PM FOR A TOTAL OF 3 INCHES.

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I picked up 6 inches of snow overnight...much more than I was expecting. 9 to 10 inches of new snow from the lake over the past 24 hours. Getting close to the 2 foot mark in snowcover.

and lucky for you, L MI still has lots of open water for nw/nnw lake snows too.

Here's this morning's modeled snow depth for MI. 

just under 4' here up in the higher terrain.

 

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Is that depth in St Clare county accurate?

 

I live in that area of 16"-20" in St Clair county. I would say it's close but hard to tell with all the drifting we get out in our area. We have more snow on the ground at our house then we do at our cabin up at Higgins Lake. When we drove home Monday evening from up there the deepest snow we saw from Grayling all the way down to home was when we got home if that tells you anything. Northern Lower needs snow!

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15 inches + of new snow since Tuesday morning here.

 

4 inches Tuesday

6 inches Tuesday night/Wednesday morning

2 inches Wednesday

3 inches last night

Today: Still snowing moderately since I left for work at 6:30 (I work 40 minutes away), so a couple more inches probably today

 

Dang, you're sounding like bo. Nice.

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Perhaps another shot Wednesday night.  GFS, Euro, and GGEM have all had a light signal here and there, though once again it looks like the set-up will be plagued by low inversion heights.  I haven't been following it long enough to know if other runs have been similar, but the 18z GFS had inversions only to 850 mb, which is usually good enough for a few inches if the band(s) stall(s), but nothing spectacular.

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Perhaps another shot Wednesday night.  GFS, Euro, and GGEM have all had a light signal here and there, though once again it looks like the set-up will be plagued by low inversion heights.  I haven't been following it long enough to know if other runs have been similar, but the 18z GFS had inversions only to 850 mb, which is usually good enough for a few inches if the band(s) stall(s), but nothing spectacular.

 

 

Besides the relatively low inversion heights, low level flow looks quite weak, which would limit accums farther inland.

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End range of the NAM but it has the band affecting the Illinois shore, at least initially.  Delta Ts certainly won't be a problem and parameters would look better than this when adjusting for lake temperature.  Airmass is pretty cold again...maybe too cold for optimal flake production?

 

 

post-14-0-14344500-1424710167_thumb.png

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I agree with Thunder Road where he mentioned a few inches farther up the thread.  That seems like a reasonable call at this point as there are some negatives, though I could see how this winds up needing an advisory as the pure lake effect duration looks to be a good 12-18 hours (though maybe not that long at any one spot).  As far as location, if I were LOT, I'd probably just broadbrush the IL/IN counties bordering the lake at this point.

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Last night and this morning's hires nest of the NAM are fairly interesting.  A band forms late morning Thursday and then wiggles back and forth for a while.  Combined clipper and LES totals of about 0.25" in some spots.  Even with sub-optimal snow growth, should still average 15:1, so 3-4" would make sense based on that liquid.

 

The 12z IWX WRF isn't as transient with the band and piles up snow in Lake County.  0.4" contour hits the shoreline and Gary and Lake Station are greater than 0.3".

 

post-1820-0-38147400-1424880950_thumb.pn

 

Would be ironic, and really isn't impossible, imo, if this event that sneaks in under the radar overperforms the big event teased for 10 days about a week and a half ago.  Only needs 2.6" here to do that.  ;)

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I posted this over in the banter thread, but despite its inherent whininess it also contains some interesting stats, so what the heck...

 

 

 

Valparaiso has had lake-effect events that produced at least 10 inches of snow in (at least) December 2004, February 2008, November 2008, February 2009, December 2010, and January 2011, this not including any synoptic-scale systems that happened to produce significant lake enhancement.
 
Since I arrived in the fall of 2011, there have been precisely zero.  Barring some fantastic model bust tomorrow night, or some other unforeseen event in the roughly ten days we have left in the season, my class will be the first since *at least* the class of 2004 to go all four years without a big lake-effect event.  And I only looked even semi-exhaustively back to 2007.  This record could easily go back into the 1990s.

 

 

Yes, for sure there has been a drought of good LES events here over the past few years.   I have lived in two snow belts, currently in Valpo and previously in Chardon, OH.  No doubt that Valpo is just a bit too far west for the flow to align properly with any regularity, whereas Chardon was similar to Western Michigan in that West and Northwest flow are good to go.

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Thoroughly impressed by some of the obs this morning!  7.0" in South Holland and 7.1" near Homewood.  Good call by LOT on hoisting LES Advisories last night!

 

6z 4 km NAM is probably the best look we've had yet, with the single band overhead from about 23z to 05z this evening.

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Thoroughly impressed by some of the obs this morning! 7.0" in South Holland and 7.1" near Homewood. Good call by LOT on hoisting LES Advisories last night!

6z 4 km NAM is probably the best look we've had yet, with the single band overhead from about 23z to 05z this evening.

We're gonna need to issue a headline for Porter in all likelihood.

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Our lake-effect guru here was pointing out how with the low-level flow so weak, the boundary layer will likely remain decoupled, meaning that the NNW or NW flow at 850 and 700 will have less bearing on the placement of the band.  It also means that the meso models' forecasts likely won't be too good wrt to exact placement, like whether it's eastern Lake, or here, or into LaPorte.

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