12/15/2004: "Lake effect" snow

Why is Buffalo, NY regularly pelted with feet upon feet of snow? It's all because of the Great Lakes and how cold air gets moisture from the lakes and then dumps it on their eastern side. This image is from yesterday (or the day before - not clear). shows the effect better than I've ever seen it. In this case, Chicago, which is located approximately along the bottom of the image where the shoreline looks greenish, does not see a single flake of snow... while Grand Rapids, Michigan, 100 miles away up and to the right, is absolutely pounded with the stuff.

I think that image is from 12-11-2000. ;)

Our mistake, it was the ApoD two weeks ago documenting snowfall on 12/5/2000.

I swear, I need to move to Buffalo.

Odd snow patterns may also created by industrial emissions. This happened to a friend of mine this morning. He lives in Linz in a part of the city that lies in the downdraft area of the VOEST steel mill.

On some mornings the condensation nuclei of the emissions cause considerable amounts of snow to fall there while in the rest of the city there's now precipitation at all. The snowplough teams don't seem to notice this because their headquarter is in a different part of the city and for example today they simply didn't come to do their job.

On those days it's best to just pull the handbrake and sliiiiiiiiiiide :D

I semi-remember that day. IIRC we got 6-8 inches in detroit... nothing compared to the New years eve/day blizzard (1998-2000 i don't exactly remember) when we got 14-20" in 5 hours. I was snowed in at my ex-girlfriends parents house that night.

What I desribed earlier is actually called "industrial snow". Unfortunately I couldn't find an english article on the subject but german speaking folks may look at this page describing the phenomenon as experienced in Linz.

You can translate the Linz-site at babelfish :)

Every snow flake forms around a tiny piece of dirt(dust) in the air. More dirt = more snow. :)

Wormfood wrote:

You can translate the Linz-site at babelfish :)

handy, but who can translate their english into actual english?:

In the night of 14. on 15 December 2004 it was again once so far: Despite stable fair weather period low-winter conditions were given to a part of the Linzer of city. Those west the Linzer of large-scale enterprises of convenient quarters new world, Bindermichl, Oed until far dipped after Leonding inside with one up to 5 cm thicken schneedecke into winter white. Reason for it were the water vapour missions in the range of the large-scale industry and the remote combined heat and power stations. The phenomenon, which admits industrial snow "under the name" is, always arises nearly each year at one or on several days, in the time around the turn of the year

that sounds like tw for chrissakes.