Lake effect snow and Lake Erie

A couple of weeks ago, I was explaining to someone from Virginia about lake effect snow. Actually, it was to explain to her why the office may be closed the next day. A day or so later, the Cleveland Plain Dealer had several articles about the Lake and how it impacts our weather in winter. The bottomline is that Lake Erie has to get cold enough to freeze mostly over (it doesn't generally freeze over totally). If it doesn't freeze over, the winds off the lake pick up more moisture and it turns into snow, mostly dumping to the east of Cleveland and on into Buffalo. The following is an excerpt from the Plain Dealer article.

"Freezing season?
Lake Erie (the shallowest and easiest-freezing Great Lake) actually rarely freezes over entirely, but the shallower Western Basin is usually first to cover up.

"The lake actually only freezes over completely about every 30 years," said John Hageman, who owns a Put-in-Bay ice fishing charter company and works for Ohio Sea Grant at the Ohio State University Stone Laboratory on Gibraltar Island.

But an unfrozen lake can be unlucky for the snow belt. Open waters provide the moisture for lake-effect snowfall that can quickly bury towns like Chardon and other eastern suburbs.

"There's no doubt that a bit of ice off Cleveland will help cut down on the lake-effect snows," Adams said. "But that's not looking likely this year, so we may end up with some heavy events in the snow belt as the winter goes on."

Ice troubles and benefits
Whether Lake Erie freezes or not affects more than just snow-shoveling in Geauga County.
The duration and the extent of an annual ice cover on Lake Erie - and the other four Great Lakes - also has economic and environmental effects.

A cold winter, with thick ice on all the lakes, can severely impede commercial navigation and even interfere with hydropower production, according to government reports.

On the other hand, wide-open waters evaporate more readily, threatening to lower the already diminished water levels of the lakes.

A recent University of Wisconsin study funded by the National Science Foundation extends those concerns to many North American lakes - from local ponds and reservoirs to the Great Lakes.
The study, released last week, suggests that lakes aren't freezing as early or staying frozen as long when compared to records of the last 150 years. "

If you want to read the entire article, it can be found here. Fortunately, I live to the west of Cleveland and generally only have to drive INTO the heavy snow, although last February 14, we got nailed and if you want to see pics of what we dug out that day, go here. (By the way, for some reason blogger isn't allowing me to post pictures . . . so that is why I keep linking to former posts :))