Lake Effect
While we were at the West Beach of Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore a couple of days ago, I noticed these clouds to our east, streaming south. If you've lived around here long enough, you know what that means: There was at that moment a ton of lake effect snow falling over Interstate 90 at Michigan City.
Lake effect snow takes place when water evaporates from the lake and forms very localized clouds that dump themselves over land as snow. The clouds often stream off the lake in thin threads that can reach more than a hundred miles inland. On rare occasions, I've seen them run all the way to the Ohio River almost 300 miles away. The streams can be very narrow, though, and the boundary between clear skies and hard snow is often instantaneous.
Lake Effect
While we were at the West Beach of Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore a couple of days ago, I noticed these clouds to our east, streaming south. If you've lived around here long enough, you know what that means: There was at that moment a ton of lake effect snow falling over Interstate 90 at Michigan City.
Lake effect snow takes place when water evaporates from the lake and forms very localized clouds that dump themselves over land as snow. The clouds often stream off the lake in thin threads that can reach more than a hundred miles inland. On rare occasions, I've seen them run all the way to the Ohio River almost 300 miles away. The streams can be very narrow, though, and the boundary between clear skies and hard snow is often instantaneous.