Regional and Mesoscale Meteorology Branch

00:00:00:08 – 00:00:13:14
Speaker 1
Mike Duritz from the, WFO in Binghamton, New York, to discuss a recent lake effect snow event. So, without further ado, let me turn it over to Mike.

00:00:13:16 – 00:00:45:19
Speaker 2
Thanks, man. I appreciate the invite, the opportunity to to talk about this event today. I was a fairly impressive, lake effect event. We had in our neck of the woods about a week or so before Thanksgiving. So we’ll obviously go through the meteorology of this event, but also, try to showcase some satellite products, that were helpful to us during the event and, could be helpful to, other forecasters in real time.

00:00:45:21 – 00:01:16:27
Speaker 2
So click outline. As I just said, we’ll talk about some of the, the synoptic, ingredients that went into this event, particularly the ones that made it, overachieving so far away from the lakeshore. We’ll talk about the value of, certain satellite products and newer satellite platforms, and we’ll go over some, typical radar imagery to look at some soundings, and then we’ll we’ll wrap it up with conclusions at the end.

00:01:17:00 – 00:01:45:22
Speaker 2
So we’ll go over some of the, the, meteorology here, 500 Millibar analysis. And we’re going to draw your attention to the northeast Pennsylvania and New York. It was 12 Zulu on the, 20th of November, I think, was a Sunday. We had a negative tilt trough that had gone through our region the night before. With a quick few inches of snow.

00:01:45:25 – 00:02:31:12
Speaker 2
The system was beginning to slow down and and close, over the northeast. And by the next morning, had become vertically stacked over northern New England. And that the Canadian maritime region, 700 millibar more or less showed the same thing. And this is the, 850 analysis. So if you kind of go back and forth here real quick on the left hand side, you can see early on the 20th the system still had some vertical tilt, whereas by the time we got to the 21st that had become completely, vertically stacked with the, very deep northwest flow in upstate New York, and that would be one of the keys to this event.

00:02:31:15 – 00:03:04:17
Speaker 2
So again, what we know so far and Amplified Cyclone, pretty much became cut off and, and vertically fact all the way up to the upper levels in northern New England. By early Monday morning, a deep cyclonic northwest flow resulted over the eastern Great Lakes, effecting Millibar. Temperatures were on the order of minus ten to perhaps -13 C during the period of heavy snow, which is certainly cold for November, but not extraordinarily so.

00:03:04:19 – 00:03:24:24
Speaker 2
I went back and looked and saw was basically, 1 to 2 standard deviations below normal. So not an extraordinarily cold air mass. But does a seasonality play a role here? And that’s something to file away in the back of your minds for a little bit later in this talk.

00:03:24:27 – 00:03:55:08
Speaker 2
So what I’m going to do now, I’m going to all tab out and I’m going to show, a number of different, satellite loops before, during and just after the event, some conventional imagery like, water vapor. I’m going to show some newer, goes-r type products, like the snow cloud discriminator. We’ll show, some total p-w, some layered precipitable water from Sierra, and even some water temperature data at the end.

00:03:55:10 – 00:04:00:23
Speaker 2
So, well.

00:04:00:26 – 00:04:25:04
Speaker 2
Show you a water vapor loop here first. And this will be rocking back and forth. So wait for it to get to the beginning. Here. And the over arching point here is to see that deep connection of Atlantic moisture that got in train into the system. So it’s coming. It’s now the negative fill trough goes through our area with some synoptic snow.

00:04:25:04 – 00:05:00:01
Speaker 2
And once we get on the backside, this deep plume of moisture comes arching around it, the cyclone and gets entrained, into the wrap around and the lake effect part of the system. So I’ll let it let it go back and play through here one more time. We’ve got a few events like this in our area in the past, and that seems to be one of the key ingredients is can you get a deep plume of moisture in the mid levels to actually overrunning or, low level environment for lake effect?

00:05:00:01 – 00:05:22:05
Speaker 2
So here we go again. System is coming through the initial system. And then you can see kind of the offshore convection develop right here. And then the deep moisture in the mid level come all the way around and get a train guy into the wraparound part of the storm.

00:05:22:07 – 00:05:55:00
Speaker 2
So going back to the presentation now and then, that’s, that’s, highlighted here on this slide I have outlined in these two different, different panels here, the, the, horizontal extents of this, Atlantic moisture that ultimately gets wrapped all the way around the cyclone and helps provide, a very deep moisture profile deeper than we typically see in a lake effect event.

00:05:55:03 – 00:06:27:03
Speaker 2
So we’ll go back again. Now we will look at a product called, shortwave albedo. It’s an infrared product. Tracking to. So how to get back. To the start of the event. And this is going back here, the main idea is it gives you a good feel for. And I’ll let it get all the way to beginning and then come back again.

00:06:27:06 – 00:06:50:23
Speaker 2
Okay. So here we go. And here’s the initial band of snow coming through. It gives you a good flavor of for some of the cold cloud tops and cooling cloud tops here in the mid on the backside of the storm. Yet at the same time at the low levels, you can see things like Lake Huron and Georgian Bay really, funneling low level moisture.

00:06:50:23 – 00:07:05:22
Speaker 2
And so, the this shortwave product here, sometimes it’s a good, a good product that you can see things going on at different levels at the same time.

00:07:06:17 – 00:07:44:15
Speaker 2
And we’ll go back to the PowerPoint. And that’s kind of illustrated here. You saw your cold cloud tops and the wrap around kind of the deformation side of the storm. Even though it was a lake effect event, there was some element of synoptic forcings. So that that’s kind of well shown by this. And then towards the end of the storm, you can even see some nice cloud top enhancement right over Lake Ontario and just downstream showing how convective we unstable at what’s in the boundary layer.

00:07:44:17 – 00:08:19:09
Speaker 2
Can jump out here and we will show this product here. It’s called a snow cloud discriminator product. So hence the name it’s it’s very handy in the winter time. Sometimes if you have a deep snow cover with the visible imagery during the day, it can be difficult for distinguish, certainly lower clouds from snow and at night sometimes to with a very cold, low level environment, with a thermal sensor, it’s going to be hard to distinguish.

00:08:19:11 – 00:08:46:09
Speaker 2
So again, you get a good flavor here for the, the deep moisture and the mid-level enhancement. Plus the, lower clouds and the, the moisture coming in from the Great Lakes. And you don’t have to worry about, snowfall contamination. So these type of products can come quite in handy during the winter.

00:08:46:12 – 00:09:25:00
Speaker 2
Now we will show, this move here is a blended total precipitable water loop. That same time frame. I’m running it from 18th November to 22nd November. And you kind of get the idea of, first, here’s the initial system going through, some deep wraparound moisture coming around the cyclone. But because it’s a product really, it’s kind of tuned for heavy, warm season events just with the, the color scale and the different, moisture amounts.

00:09:25:00 – 00:09:51:05
Speaker 2
It shows. It doesn’t really show up super. Well, we, we had, and, and I’ll show you here like this, this image in the presentation going to be a loop on the left. This is from this SPC mezzo analysis showing the actual amounts of, precipitable water, from the the wrap model and our, our total.

00:09:51:05 – 00:10:16:28
Speaker 2
P.W. was somewhere on the order of, 3/10 to 4/10, maybe up to a half an inch for this event, which certainly is nothing. Compared to the moisture, amounts you’ll see in a warm season event. But it’s not bad for a lake effect events, even though it doesn’t sound like much between a quarter and a half inch precipitable water, it’s not bad.

00:10:16:29 – 00:10:25:23
Speaker 2
You’re you’re starting to see some moisture up into the mid-levels. When you see those kind of amounts for Lake effect.

00:10:25:25 – 00:10:51:16
Speaker 2
So this here is a layered precipitable water loop from Sierra, and I know it’s consumed out. So I’ll kind of I’ll put the cursor here over the northeast. And what you’re seeing here, the these are four different layers of the atmosphere, if you will surface to age 60. And then the upper left, it’s 50 to 700, in the upper right, 7 to 5 in the lower left.

00:10:51:16 – 00:11:21:15
Speaker 2
And then your upper levels 5 to 300 in the lower right. And again, if I put the cursor over this area, you’ll see that the the wraparound moisture is easier to discern on the layered precipitable water than it is on the total. And this is just one of many examples here where the layered p-w really adds can add some context to what you’re looking at.

00:11:21:18 – 00:11:52:24
Speaker 2
If you can parse the moisture into different layers, as opposed to looking at one continuous depth. So especially at the 7 to 500, you can see that that wrap around really making itself known or on the backside of the cyclone. And it’s probably hard to tell zoomed out. But towards the end of the fluid in the surface to 850, you can see a nice plume coming from Georgia de down into the York Intensive area.

00:11:52:24 – 00:12:15:04
Speaker 2
So you can definitely see some different ingredients when you, you look at this layer CW product, it’s a product that’s probably looked at more again in the warm season for Heavy Rain. But, this is just one example of how it, it could have utility really year round at different kinds of events.

00:12:15:07 – 00:12:41:07
Speaker 2
And this is another, kind of prototype goes our practices, the geo color imagery, the lower cloud features, during the night time are shown, as red colored. And of course, you get the visible during the day. And again, this is a nice, a nice product to to see what’s going on at different levels at the same time.

00:12:41:10 – 00:12:59:00
Speaker 2
Again, here’s our national band going through. You can see the depth of the wraparound moisture behind it, but also a good sense looking at the lower clouds of the, upstream lake connection from Huron and Georgian Bay.

00:12:59:03 – 00:13:24:27
Speaker 2
And then this is a loop of Great Lakes sea surface temperatures from NASA sports. This is a seven day loop that kind of centers around the event, runs from maybe 17, 18th November to about the 20s. And you can kind of tell from the Lachance here, Lake Ontario on a Lake Erie with a shallow a lake. It’s normally a bit warmer.

00:13:24:27 – 00:14:05:04
Speaker 2
Lake Ontario is deeper, but even Lake Ontario look at the warm temperatures during this event. Generally for most of the, the heavy snowfall, the water temperatures were in the low to mid 50s, plus ten to plus 13 Celsius, which is well above the climatology curve, for that early in the season. So that speaks to one of the slides I showed earlier, even though the air mass wasn’t super, super cold in the, 925 to 850 up to 700 layer, it didn’t really have to be because the water temperatures were so warm.

00:14:05:04 – 00:14:31:14
Speaker 2
You still had very steep, water to Air Delta teams, even with an 850 temperature of minus ten, because your water surface was so, so warm for that point in November. And we certainly think that was another key that helped. This event turned out to be what it was. And then here is, some bobcat soundings.

00:14:31:16 – 00:14:57:08
Speaker 2
And over here on the left, it’s the, sounding profile from the Nam model for Binghamton on the evening of the 20. You can see again the saturation going up, almost to 500 deliveries. Pretty deep for a lake effect event. And this yellow line here on the temperature profile, that is where you have a saturated dendrite growth zone.

00:14:57:10 – 00:15:32:20
Speaker 2
That’s basically our layer between -12 and -18. Seeing that it’s saturated and it’s nearly 250 millibars peak at this particular time. So not only did you have deep saturation in general, but you had, a deep layer that was favorable for dendrite production, but certainly healthy accumulation efficiency. And again, I talking about what I was before. For those that are familiar with forecasting lake effect, one of the things we look for is the height of the capping inversion.

00:15:32:20 – 00:15:59:12
Speaker 2
I’m kind of highlighting that with the cursor here. And for this reason not not extraordinarily deep. That’s, maybe around 800 millibars, just as a means of comparison, a big event they had off of Lake Erie south of Buffalo a couple of years ago, where they had 70 plus inches in a couple of days. Another big event they had there in October a few years back.

00:15:59:14 – 00:16:24:14
Speaker 2
They saw equilibrium levels up to 550, 500, even above 500 Noah bars. So this is pretty tame by comparison with that. But the key is, where it’s often you dry out above that capping average and you remain saturated for quite a long ways above it this time. So again, it’s that depth of moisture that really put this event over the top.

00:16:24:17 – 00:16:49:13
Speaker 2
And this is a neat, radar Luke Chow play through a couple times. Again, here’s the initial initial synoptic snow that comes through with the cold front and then the shortwave. The cyclones got to close off tonight. Are going to see the wrap around in the lake effect start. And once that Georgian Bay connected band gets going in the southern tier lookout persistent.

00:16:49:13 – 00:17:17:21
Speaker 2
That is basically doesn’t move for 18 to 24 hours because what really lags and then starts to inch north here towards the end and start tracking the finger Lakes and Cortland County and places like that. But an extremely persistent, lake effect band that far away from the lake shore, which led to our, our high snowfall totals again toward the end.

00:17:17:21 – 00:17:31:12
Speaker 2
Here, I’ll. I’ll play this through one more time.

00:17:31:15 – 00:17:35:29
Speaker 2
Okay.

00:17:36:01 – 00:17:43:27
Speaker 2
Here we go again with the initial initial band of snow.

00:17:44:00 – 00:18:05:04
Speaker 2
Which was nothing super special, by the way. It was maybe 2 to 4in 3 to 5 miles of the real snow. This event was the lake effect part of it. And again, look at the persistence of this band across the Southern Tier. And even some places in northern Pennsylvania got over a foot of snow, once the lake effect started.

00:18:05:06 – 00:18:23:25
Speaker 2
Very persistent. And then starts to edge north, while still maintaining its intensity for a while here, towards the end.

00:18:23:28 – 00:18:39:09
Speaker 2
And now it’s, starting to go north and starting to weaken here towards the end as the moisture is, getting more shallow.

00:18:39:11 – 00:19:11:12
Speaker 2
And these are now, this map is center of granite on our specific county warning area, but it gives you the idea of the magnitude of snowfall we saw with this event. And also the type the tight gradient, areas that remain just south and west of these lake bands got very little, in some cases less than an inch now by Elmira and Corning that the real, heavy band ran from east of Rochester, between Syracuse and Auburn and down right about to the office here.

00:19:11:25 – 00:19:35:15
Speaker 2
Quite a few places had in the 25 to 35 inch range total over a couple of days period. We observed about 27 here at our office, there some place in the Finger Lakes and in the lower 30s, also approached south and east of Saki. Is that near 30in?

00:19:35:18 – 00:20:10:16
Speaker 2
And these are some, fun time lapse. Loops. I’ll show of the snowfall. This is courtesy of our. It’ll. Yeah. This running on its back porch during this event. So you’ll see kind of the initial, snowfall. Start here with that. Front coming through. And then we got a we’ll have a lull for a while overnight into the next morning before the lake effect kicks in.

00:20:10:18 – 00:20:26:15
Speaker 2
Once we get to 6 or 7 in the morning, we start to have a few squalls. Come through here, but the real heavy snow is going to be a little bit after that.

00:20:26:18 – 00:20:55:04
Speaker 2
Starting to. Pick it up a little bit here at the next hour or two. That will really see it start to ramp up. And this is when the band really started to settle in over the Southern Tier. You see the obvious, impact there, fairly rapid accumulation during the late afternoon into the evening period.

00:20:55:06 – 00:21:10:25
Speaker 2
And then there’s another, time lapse. He had some a slightly different angle that you kind of want to show to.

00:21:10:27 – 00:21:18:03
Speaker 2
Actually see the camera lens start to get buried a little bit toward the end of this one.

00:21:18:05 – 00:21:40:10
Speaker 2
And that’s the initial snow. And I’ve got a little break here. Obviously the lake effect kicks place.

00:21:40:13 – 00:21:55:18
Speaker 2
Here. Snow showers coming through once we get into the early to mid afternoon. And that’s again when the, the, that Georgian Bay band really settled in at our neck of the woods. Here you go.

00:21:55:20 – 00:22:19:02
Speaker 2
From that, we could tell, what we saw. The, the airport, reports coming in snowfall rates were typically in the 1 to 3 inch and hour range, from late afternoon into the early evening when that band was really settled. And we did have some two and a half to three inch per hour rates right in the middle of that band.

00:22:19:05 – 00:22:50:11
Speaker 2
So and to wrap things up, it was, fairly high end lake effect snow events for the Southern Tier of New York and a future in saturation that’s, at or above six kilometers. This was spearheaded by a persistent inflow in the Netherlands. From the Atlantic. You had the dendritic growth layer, 200 plus millibars thick, one last small time lake influence to our June day in Lake Huron.

00:22:50:27 – 00:23:10:18
Speaker 2
Certainly help factor in besides Lake Ontario. And then this was held by pretty much a rock steady 303/10. Well, in the boundary layer and in water temperatures were quite a bit above climatology for in November.

00:23:10:20 – 00:23:49:13
Speaker 2
So and some final thoughts here. Close inspection of things like, traditional water vapor, but also your layered. I think precipitable water imagery really helped show the large scale pattern and the greater than typical, moisture depths to enhance this lake effect event. And once again, as, many of us have seen, that of what that layer precipitable water imagery at showed some important details and added context over and above some of your traditional, imagery and your total considerable water.

00:23:49:15 – 00:24:21:00
Speaker 2
A future work item I’m going to be happening is, comparing this particular case to another, very heavy lake effect that we had in early to mid December in 2010. There are some areas in that event south of Syracuse, I believe, that had between 40 and 60in of snow in just a few day period. And from what I can remember again, it was a big, Atlantic inflow was one of the keys to that event.

00:24:21:00 – 00:24:44:19
Speaker 2
So I think that would be a pretty fascinating comparison to, to, look at those two events in tandem. And I know John is still on the line, but, I know he’s rerun the layered precipitable water for some events in the past. I think it would be awesome if we could get it for that event, too, which is something I may be talking to him about in the coming weeks.

00:24:44:21 – 00:24:49:22
Speaker 1
John had to to leave, but oh yes, I know I can talk to him.

00:24:49:24 – 00:25:16:26
Speaker 2
Okay. And again, just a quick acknowledgment here to John for, having the, archival BW loop available to easily grab. Also, thanks to Ryan Murphy, our IPO, and one of our soon to be departed journeymen for providing some, movies and captions. And I’d be happy to take any questions. The left hand up picture here is how my backyard look the next morning.

00:25:16:28 – 00:25:29:26
Speaker 2
And then that was, nice sunset picture we took at the office. Just after the snow finally stopped.

00:25:29:29 – 00:25:36:18
Speaker 2
So, again, any questions? I’d be happy to take.

00:25:36:20 – 00:25:58:00
Speaker 3
A day, and if nobody has a question, this is Ed. So code in Boulder. I have a question or two. Okay. Go ahead. Yeah. Hey, I love that time lapse. Clearly, he’s got to get a get a clock that stands a little higher. He looked like it got very pretty good. Yeah. Yeah, there’s a there’s a tremendous.

00:25:59:17 – 00:26:03:07
Speaker 3
But one quick question. First is, is Ray Brady still there?

00:26:03:09 – 00:26:05:13
Speaker 2
Yeah. Ray, is the fact that there.

00:26:05:13 – 00:26:07:02
Speaker 3
Weren’t any any years ago.

00:26:07:05 – 00:26:08:02
Speaker 2
Yeah. Okay.

00:26:09:06 – 00:26:16:13
Speaker 3
How did, do you have any comment on how the forecast models did, in particular some of the high res stuff.

00:26:16:15 – 00:26:44:26
Speaker 2
The, the high res models, they they did. Okay, as far as showing the big picture and showing that we would have a pretty lengthy window of, multivan, Lake Ontario type activity with maybe some enhancement from Georgian Bay. But I don’t think any of us models and humans alike anticipated the quite the magnitude of what we had.

00:26:44:29 – 00:26:56:10
Speaker 2
Certainly none of the models captured the, the magnitude of the Qpf so far south, and I think it caught a lot of us by surprise of that. Okay.

00:26:56:12 – 00:27:14:04
Speaker 3
Okay. Thanks. Very nice presentation. Yeah. Thanks. Hey, this is Bill Schulberg from JP s program. I did have a question. Sure. Would you say that the the layer of precipitable water was, was key during the event, or did you guys just see it kind of after the fact?

00:27:14:06 – 00:27:51:03
Speaker 2
Well, I was looking at it during the event, but you know, being again, a in the grand scheme of things to most forecasters, I think a new product, I’m not sure how many other people were really looking at it, but I was looking at it during the event and it it helped to give me, give me, some confidence that some of what I thought I was seeing and the, the water vapor and was hinted at in some of the models was what’s actually taking place.

00:27:51:05 – 00:28:12:03
Speaker 2
And and like I think I said before, it was another, kind of confidence enhancer, even in the low levels, you could really see the plume of moisture coming off Georgian Bay and Lake Huron. So certainly after the events, it showed a lot, but I would say even even in the middle of that, I was looking at the product.

00:28:12:05 – 00:28:31:06
Speaker 3
And I just, you know, it’s a great story. And, of course, I’m, I’m excited that we’re supporting John’s work. But, you know, we just want to socialize that, both locally and also but also as far afield as we can get the value of that, product.

00:28:31:08 – 00:28:55:01
Speaker 2
Right, right. Well, I, I definitely hold to what I said before. It adds context to, over and above some other products. That we look at. So, I, I think it, I think this is one of the events was what workshops some value.

00:28:55:04 – 00:28:57:24
Speaker 1
Okay. Any other questions or comments from Mike?

00:28:58:07 – 00:29:18:04
Speaker 3
Hey, Dan, this is Ed again. Well, maybe Bill, I don’t know if. Is Bill, do you think aware of that blog we just wrote? Where we talked about this product in relation to a much, less snowy event but kind of a surprise event over the Colorado mountains. And I shared it with, Cheyenne and Junction and both those offices.

00:29:18:07 – 00:29:42:01
Speaker 3
Now, we’d like to get the, layered product over a so we’re setting them up for that? Yeah, I think I’ve seen that, that blog, and in fact, you know, NLP blogs are getting are becoming pretty common. Yeah. Okay. That’s good news. But I just to get it out. To get it, beat the drums up.

00:29:42:03 – 00:30:07:09
Speaker 3
Drums a little bit is is a good thing. This is, Sheldon said I should also point out that Mike George, back on November 20th, sent out an email to, the, LP, team that’s doing them a paper, one another one is the case studies, and he, mentioned it back on November 20th.

00:30:07:09 – 00:30:35:05
Speaker 3
And I also responded with, what I was also was seeing. So, and I think, the fact that Mike, took the time to put out an email about the, storm and using Opw, back on November 20th shows that, he was kind of excited about what he was seeing, in the, imagery and, trying to use it for his forecast.

00:30:35:07 – 00:30:40:19
Speaker 3
Yep. Very good.

00:30:40:22 – 00:30:47:00
Speaker 1
But any other questions or comments for Mike?

00:30:47:03 – 00:30:55:09
Speaker 1
Okay. We all want to thank Mike. This is a great job. And thanks for, putting time and effort into this, Mike. It was great.

00:30:55:19 – 00:30:58:10
Speaker 2
No problem. I, I appreciate the opportunity.

00:30:58:13 – 00:31:01:08
Speaker 1
Okay. Well that’s it. Thanks, everybody, and have a great day.