Lake effect and lake enhanced snow in the Champlain Valley of Vermont

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Tardy, Alexander O.
Copyright Year	2000
Abstract	The weather phenomena known as lake effect snow has long been documented for the Great Lakes Region (Peace and Sykes 1966; Holroyd 1971; Lavoie 1972; Niziol et al. 1995). The snowfall associated with these large bodies of water usually has a significant impact on people and aviation several times each winter. Recent software such has the Buffalo Toolkit ,called BUFKIT (Mahoney and Niziol 1997) has enabled forecasters to predict the magnitude, areal coverage, and duration of these mesoscale events. Also, lake effect forecasting has improved with the development of high resolution models that recognize local terrain features and the existence of large lakes. Less literature exists about snow produced by smaller bodies of water (Carpenter 1993; Cosgrove et al. 1996), mainly because it does not fall at established observing sites, affects few people, and occurs infrequently. However, since the recent installation of a Weather Surveillance Radar1988 Doppler (WSR-88D) near Burlington, Vermont, several events have occurred that exhibit similar characteristics and effects as those associated with Great Lakes snows. The purpose of this study is to analyze snowfalls associated with Lake Champlain with the use of Doppler radar data, Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES-8) data, and high resolution numerical output from the Meso-Eta (Black 1994) model. The impact of these snowfalls can be as great as synoptic scale storms. The most common result of arctic air crossing the relatively warmer Lake Champlain is low clouds and flurries. However, on rare occasions snow squalls with visibilities less than a 1/4-mile and up to 33-cm (13 inches) of pure lake effect snow in a 12-h period have been observed. This paper will explore events which fit the category of lake effect or lake enhanced, and develop criteria for forecasting them.
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Alternate Webpage(s)	https://www.weather.gov/media/erh/ta2000-05.pdf
Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article