Thursday, December 30, 2010

Overnight Lake Effect

The post-frontal phase of our storm last night produced mostly lake-effect precipitation, which at times organized into wind-parallel bands.


Note how the coverage, structure, and orientation of the lake-effect is quite variable.  There is no computer modeling system or forecaster that can reliably predict such variability.  This is why it is so difficult to provided detailed lake-effect forecasts.  About all you can say is that lake-effect is possible downstream of the lake, but we don't know the details of where, when, and how much.

3 comments:

  1. It is pretty variable that's for sure. I got 6 inches from the lake band last night... didn't melt it down but i bet its 15 or 20:1 ratio.

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  2. Not sure if anybody else has been looking at the radar, but there are very light echoes if any near the U and it has been snowing fairly hard outside for awhile. The large snow particles (looks like dendritic aggregates out the window) must be in a pretty shallow layer for the radar beam to be missing them. Makes me think the snow crystals are growing quite rapidly.

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  3. I came down from Solitude around 4PM where is really wasnt snowing and the sun disc was visible. Clouds increased down canyon and snow was falling. Snow was falling below 7000ft.

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