All about the Snowbelt and Lake Effect Snow

Category: File - :Great Lakes Snowbelt EPA fr.png|thumb|upright=2|Map showing the snowbelts around the Great Lakes of North America with 150 cm accumulations or more during winter

The snowbelt is a North American region, much of which lies downwind of the Great Lakes, where heavy snowfall is particularly common on predominately eastern and southern shores of the Great Lakes. Near the Great Lakes, lake-effect snow is caused by cold air picking up moisture while crossing the lake and then releasing it as snow when the air cools over land. The lakes produce lake effect snow and continuous cloudy skies throughout the winter months, as long as air temperatures are colder than the lake water temperatures or until the lakes freeze over.

Well-known snowbelt sections exist southeast of Lake Erie from Cleveland, Ohio to Buffalo, New York and south of Lake Ontario stretching roughly from Rochester, New York, to Utica, New York, and northward to Watertown, New York. Similar snowbelts exist on the e...

Lake-effect snow is produced in the winter when cold winds move across long expanses of warmer lake water, providing energy and picking up water vapor which freezes and is deposited on the windward shores. The same effect over bodies of salt water is called ocean effect snow, sea effect snow, or even bay effect snow. The effect is enhanced when the moving air mass is uplifted by the orographic effect of higher elevations on the downwind shores. This uplifting can produce narrow, but very intense bands of precipitation, which deposit at a rate of many inches of snow each hour and often bringing copious snowfall totals. The areas affected by lake-effect snow are called snowbelts. This effect occurs in many locations throughout the world, but is best known in the populated areas of the Great Lakes of North America.

If the air temperature is not low enough to keep the precipitation frozen, it falls as lake-effect rain. In order for lake-effect rain or snow to form, the air moving across the...