Regional and Mesoscale Meteorology Branch

00:00:00:17 – 00:00:22:17
Speaker 1
Okay. Welcome to today’s satellite chat. Our afternoon version here. And, we’re going to talk some about, lake effect snow to begin with here because it’s, been very cold in recent weeks. And one of the things that can happen when it gets so cold, like this is, lake effect snow events that can really dump a lot of snow over some localized areas here.

00:00:22:17 – 00:01:00:18
Speaker 1
So what I’m looking at right here is the 850 millibar temperatures from the Nam. 12. The of 7th January last Tuesday. And also looking at the rate of reports overlaid here. So, the thing to note is the exceptionally cold temperatures, very strong cold advection over the Great Lakes at this time. The observed 850 temperature at the buffalo is -27.7, which ranks as the, I think, tied for the 13th coldest on record of all the, upper air launches there from Buffalo.

00:01:00:18 – 00:01:27:10
Speaker 1
So it gives you an idea of the extreme instability that you can develop when you have that type of airmass over, water surfaces where there’s no ice cover. The other thing I wanted to point out is the winds. And you can see the winds are plenty strong right around 40 knots or so. So that enables you to pick up the sensible and latent heat fluxes from the lake and deepen, boundary layer, get that lake effect snow, going here.

00:01:27:15 – 00:01:53:07
Speaker 1
And also a pretty favorable fact that was forecast here actually did occur, over the eastern Great Lakes. So let’s go ahead and start off by looking at some, synthetic imagery, the synthetic air imagery. And I’ll just kind of slowly step through this since we’re using, go to meeting this is now on the seventh, and I’ll slowly step along.

00:01:53:13 – 00:02:23:00
Speaker 1
And once you can, plainly see, first off, here is the various lake effect snow bands that are forecast across the Great Lakes and particularly over the eastern Great Lakes. We’re going to focus in on them. You can see, over Lake Erie, the lake effect snow band, and, Lake Erie, as well as Lake Ontario. The one thing that probably sticks out, as you’re looking at this is the, ice cover on the lakes here.

00:02:23:03 – 00:02:47:21
Speaker 1
Remember, this is model outputs of the representation of the ice cover over the lakes is can be smooth down somewhat compared to reality. We’ll look at reality here in terms of, satellite imagery in just a little bit. But I just wanted to know how you can see portions of Lake Erie that are ice covered here. And then you can see where there’s a lack of ice cover, where you still have that open water.

00:02:47:21 – 00:03:08:16
Speaker 1
That’s where we have the colder brightness temperatures, the lake effect, snow bands that are set up. And notice over Ontario, we don’t have nearly as much, ice cover. And we’ll see that in the, goes imagery here and just a little bit. So let’s go ahead to our gos visible imagery. This is from the previous day and the sixth.

00:03:08:16 – 00:03:32:24
Speaker 1
I just wanted to point out the ice cover that was pretty much present during the event here. And I’ll slowly look through this. The first thing to note is, the fact that over Lake Ontario, there wasn’t a whole lot of ice cover, however, over Lake Erie where we’re zoomed in, there was a fair amount of ice cover, particularly over the southwest, third or so of Lake Erie.

00:03:33:02 – 00:03:53:03
Speaker 1
You can see quite a bit of, ice cover. If you look this really fast, it shows up quite a bit better since but since we’re using, go to meeting, I don’t want to loop anything really fast here. The another way to really indicate to you or really stand out where you have the open water, here is where you have the boundary layer cumulus developing.

00:03:53:03 – 00:04:18:01
Speaker 1
So where do you see those? Northeast to southwest oriented lines of cumulus, where you see, that’s where we’re getting our sensible fluxes. And that means those are the areas where we have our open water here. So, a fair amount of, ice cover, ice cover over Lake Erie. And that played a role. There was a good amount of snow around, two feet in the Buffalo area.

00:04:18:03 – 00:04:43:03
Speaker 1
However, you can imagine there would have been that much more if Lake Erie would have been, totally wide open and no ice cover here. So, very favorable. Fetch here for Lake Erie with southwest flow over an extended period of time. But this ice cover did play a role in terms of, somewhat limiting the amount of snow that that could have fallen and if the area was completely open.

00:04:43:06 – 00:05:10:28
Speaker 1
Okay, now let’s switch over to Lake Ontario and talk a little bit about, what happened over Ontario here as well. I’m going to start by looking at the meters here and interesting, thing to point out here. I just stopped right here at 17 on the seventh, and you can see a very cold air mass across the region with, temperatures mostly slightly below zero to, a little bit above zero.

00:05:10:28 – 00:05:34:29
Speaker 1
So around zero for the most part. However, you can see, downwind of the lakes here is actually the warmest temperatures in this scene. For example, over here at Watertown on the eastern Lake, Ontario, nine degrees, because, they’re getting the the winds off the lake here. So warming them up. Somewhat. So we do see indications of that in the, temperature fields here as well.

00:05:35:10 – 00:05:58:06
Speaker 1
What I’m going to do next is turn off the meters and focus in on the imagery itself here over Lake Erie. First of all, you can see, pretty clearly where the lake effect snow bands are with those lines of, Cumulus streets, where you have the open water there across, Lake Erie. And like I said, that was affecting the area right around Buffalo.

00:05:58:08 – 00:06:28:00
Speaker 1
And then, over Lake Ontario, you can see, first of all, a pretty clearly a pretty intense single band across the major axis of Lake Ontario. I’ll go ahead and draw here. Just, make this a little easier to see. There’s a strong single band that was proximately oriented right here. And then just to the north of that, there is a considerably weaker band.

00:06:28:02 – 00:06:48:12
Speaker 1
And then just to the south of that, there is a weaker band as well. And, when we look at the radar imagery here and next on the east and the Lake Ontario, it’ll it’ll show it in a little bit more detail. But I wanted to highlight it here so you can think of those various, solenoids or circulations that are in place here, with the most intense ones being close to this single band.

00:06:48:14 – 00:07:19:27
Speaker 1
And then the southern one is interesting because it likely has origins here off Lake Erie, where you have the, elevated, mixed, where the, the elevated boundary layer, I should say, that goes from Buffalo towards the Rochester area. You still have this, region of, higher boundary layer, and then it goes over the, shorter fetch of Lake Ontario, and you can more easily get that lake effect snow, band going when it’s already, when you already have this deep and boundary layer here.

00:07:19:27 – 00:07:49:29
Speaker 1
So it’s interesting to see all these, various, features in the, visible satellite imagery. So, what I want to do next here is go to the next, image I want to show here. I just need to go back here and go to the beginning here. What I have here is the hourly, RTM for surface winds and surface temperatures, along with the, radar reflectivity.

00:07:50:02 – 00:08:13:01
Speaker 1
And this is at 11 Z. You can see the orientation of the band at this particular time. Watertown is right about here. So it’s south of Watertown. And at this time, a little more east or west oriented later, it’ll become more, northeast, southwest oriented. But it’s interesting to see the RTM surface temperatures over the lake being on the order of about 20 degrees.

00:08:13:04 – 00:08:45:18
Speaker 1
And then the very strong winds, you can actually see some 50 knot barbs in here as well. So we had this owl field project going on and an array of additional observations that were going on. And so it’ll be very interesting to see how close these were to reality in terms of, the additional observations that we have over the lake in terms of these wind speeds and, and also, the surface temperatures that you get, because you can see as soon as you move inland, just a little bit at the temperatures or are very, very cold.

00:08:45:20 – 00:09:15:14
Speaker 1
And, you can also plainly see, the convergence here in the, in the RTM. So let’s go ahead and advance along through the daytime hours. You’ll see the band moves a little bit further to the north, just a little bit southwest of Watertown, set up for, a long, quite a long period of time. And through a number of these images that I’m showing, you can pretty easily see those three bands that I pointed out earlier in the visible imagery.

00:09:15:14 – 00:09:46:10
Speaker 1
You have the, the very intense, single band that’s just south of Watertown, a much weaker band just north of Watertown. And then further to the south, the one that’s, coming across the southeast portion of Lake Ontario. You can see that as well with, again, likely starting within a, higher the boundary layer that’s affecting over the land there from the Rochester area, from from Lake Erie, over the Rochester area, and then over the southeastern portions of Lake Ontario here.

00:09:46:13 – 00:10:12:03
Speaker 1
So, yeah. Well, with the Owl’s Field project, will, we’ll see a lot of, interesting results here, hopefully. And there was lightning here as well. I’m not showing that, but, a lot of interesting research questions related to electrification in these, very cold environments. So hopefully we’ll get some, insight into as well. That’s all I wanted to say.

00:10:12:03 – 00:10:27:07
Speaker 1
I may I’m going to turn it over to Scotland’s Stream to talk a little bit more about the lake effect snow, but, before that, I just wanted to ask if Buffalo, if you have any questions or comments or discussion you want to address here.

00:10:27:09 – 00:10:50:21
Speaker 2
Yeah. One kind of interesting thing that we noted here towards the tail end of this event on Lake Erie, of course, the Lake Erie ice cover is expanding very rapidly during this event. We actually see it beneath the lake effect. Clouds are increasing across the lake. But towards the end of the event, I was on Wednesday day when it broke into two different, bands, and there were actually two bands over Lake Erie, which is unusual with the southwest flow.

00:10:50:23 – 00:11:03:09
Speaker 2
And the next day when it was clear we got a good visible shot of the lake, and there was actually kind of two primary areas of open water left. So is the ice cover that kind of caused the band to split into two, which was very interesting.

00:11:03:18 – 00:11:20:21
Speaker 1
Yes. I remember seeing that in the, the radar, reflective from Buffalo as well. It was very interesting. It’s also interesting to hear, the rapid development of, of the ice during the event because it was so cold and, Yeah. Yes. And that those are some really interesting things.

00:11:20:23 – 00:11:35:27
Speaker 2
And so windy too. That’s unusual to have the ice forming while it’s so windy. Yeah. And I’m not sure how much it was forming and how much it was moving from the Western band and down the lake. Yeah, it’s probably a combination of both.

00:11:36:00 – 00:11:46:12
Speaker 1
And I heard about the, the ice jam, flooding issues and, Grand Island in the Niagara River as well. So it was, that was pretty interesting as well.

00:11:46:15 – 00:12:02:02
Speaker 2
Yeah, that can happen. Kind of as the lake is freezing up, that ice can move around a lot, and a lot of it got pushed down the river and closed down for, about a half a day or so before they got most out there to break it up. That’s that’s a pretty rare event that doesn’t happen very often.

00:12:02:04 – 00:12:17:29
Speaker 1
Right? Okay. Let me turn it over to Scott Lindstrom, and he’ll show some additional imagery here. Related to lake effect snow. And then, cover some other topics here as well.

00:12:18:01 – 00:12:41:21
Speaker 2
Okay. I hope you can see my screen. I’m showing a screenshot of the Simms satellite blog. Dan mentioned the owls field program over the eastern Great Lakes, and as part of that, Goes 13 was placed in super rapid scan operations. So I don’t know how easy it would be for an office, for example, for Buffalo to call.

00:12:41:23 – 00:13:03:27
Speaker 2
And so for lake effect bands, I mean, there’s when you have these big Arctic outbreaks, it’s unusual to have other interesting weather going on because it’s so cold and there’s usually such a large region, it’s cold over the eastern U.S.. So, I don’t know if you’ve ever called for an so during a lake effect event, I guess I’ll just ask that.

00:13:03:27 – 00:13:24:26
Speaker 2
Have you ever done that in in the Buffalo office? We had a goes-r project a couple of years ago where we had planned to do it, and we never got a, good lake effect event for us. Okay. So, yeah, this year we’re really excited to have the opportunity to do that, right? We, we’ve been working with owls, and, Dan Lindsey, I believe out in, right, right.

00:13:24:28 – 00:13:44:04
Speaker 2
So we’re really thrilled that, particularly for this event right here that, we had almost, you know, cirrus overhead. Fantastic. Unlike the one, the earlier one. I know they called it a sorriso earlier, but it was, a lot of serious situation with that one. But anyway, I didn’t I’m not going to play the one minute imagery on this.

00:13:44:06 – 00:14:25:13
Speaker 2
I mean, I’ll show it to you, but because this is over, I have, I have a on that blog page, there’s a picture centered over Lake Ontario, and there’s also one centered over Lake Erie. But being because this is go to a meeting, typically I find that the animations aren’t don’t show up that well. But if you go to this website, you can download these and view them, as much as you want to, one of the, one of the thing I noticed this week, is that we had a night, I guess this is early Monday morning where Sumi NPP passed overhead, and the day night band gave a really

00:14:25:13 – 00:14:52:28
Speaker 2
nice image of the ice cover over Lake Erie. So typically you think, well, if I want to look at the ice cover, I’ve got to figure you got to look for clear skies during the day. But when you have, because Sumi NPP allows essentially visible imagery at night at times of good lunar, illumination, which was happening on Monday, I think for somewhere around full moon now, you can really see exactly where the ice cover is.

00:14:53:01 – 00:15:15:03
Speaker 2
And there are those two principal regions right now where there’s, open water and you can see it just north of Cleveland to Sandusky. And then on the other side of the other side of the lake, and then also kind of just upstream of Buffalo as well. So a lot of ice on Lake Erie right now. But, there is still some open water.

00:15:15:03 – 00:15:40:26
Speaker 2
So the long range forecasts are still showing some pretty potent cold air outbreaks coming down. So you you might still expect to see some good lake effect off of Lake Erie. Unless it, completely freezes over, which would, inhibit a lot of the production. And it’s also kind of curious that this, with the strong south winds is kind of wondering if it would blow the ice pack off shore.

00:15:40:26 – 00:16:08:14
Speaker 2
And I get it. Looks like there’s open water right off Erie here. Up to, south extreme western New York, because maybe the ice pack isn’t blown to the north. But I can’t quite tell. It does look like there’s open water right off of Erie, though, with that nice strong south west wind. One other thing I want to talk about before I give this over to Scott Brockmire is something out on the West Coast.

00:16:08:28 – 00:16:36:06
Speaker 2
And that is how dry it’s been out there. This is a TP of total precipitable water determined by, microwave imagery. And it’s shown, as has been the case almost all winter. Just very, very dry conditions, very low total precipitable water off the coast of California. The small picture in the inset. I’m not going to swap out with the frames, but that’s the percent of normal.

00:16:36:17 – 00:16:58:06
Speaker 2
And that’s way down under 10% of normal off the coast of California. So, a big drought out there, that’s going to be a big problem if, this pattern doesn’t shift soon because they really don’t get a lot of rain after in a typical year, after January, February. And, here we are in mid January. There’s really nothing in the long range prediction to say there’s going to be more precipitation.

00:16:58:06 – 00:17:19:04
Speaker 2
So, Scott is on the do you have any questions on the day night band? Or, or the sumi NPP imagery that I showed, I just I guess I’ll just put that right back up. Is that something you get in your office?

00:17:19:06 – 00:17:50:15
Speaker 2
No, we don’t have that in the works. Of course, there are lists available some other way. But we we do have access, through various websites. You can get this through a, I mean, this is, we we we distribute it to the regional headquarters. So if you have the bandwidth, it’s something you can you can access and, just send us an email, get you started on accessing it, because it does gives you some really compelling imagery every now and then.

00:17:50:17 – 00:17:54:24
Speaker 2
So, Dan, if you want to give this over to Scott now and he can talk about the.

00:17:54:27 – 00:18:02:23
Speaker 1
Okay, I had a couple quick, quick questions for you. First, the, mimic was what’s the reason that’s not available over the Great Lakes?

00:18:03:04 – 00:18:19:01
Speaker 2
It’s, you know, in the summer, it might be. I think they probably have masked it out now because of concerns about ice. Oh, okay. And I’m not sure why they haven’t done that over, Hudson Bay.

00:18:19:04 – 00:18:34:05
Speaker 1
Okay. Yeah, you can maybe find out, more about that. Yeah. I guess the other quick question for Buffalo is, what are you guys looking at? The South loops, in real time via Dan Lindsay’s, web page.

00:18:34:07 – 00:18:34:27
Speaker 2
Yes. We work.

00:18:35:02 – 00:18:51:13
Speaker 1
Okay. Great. Okay. What I’m going to do next is, we’ll go over to Scott Brockmire, also at UW Sims.

00:18:51:16 – 00:19:25:27
Speaker 2
Okay. As you just heard from the just from, from from the other Scott about our dry has been in the California area. I thought I’d have a look and see if I could see, an indication of any hot spots from any areas of active burning. Apparently there isn’t anything huge happening currently, but I did see one tiny hot spot right here in the overnight hours.

00:19:27:20 – 00:19:56:15
Speaker 2
Just a. Foothills of the mountains. So with this enhancement, we began to see the the colors. When we get in air, the air is hotter than plus.

00:19:56:17 – 00:20:07:15
Speaker 2
Burning. So if I hold the cursor over that hot area there. Yeah. We seeing that it is.

00:20:07:17 – 00:20:22:01
Speaker 2
That hot? And then if I zoom out a little bit and move more towards the L.A. area. And zoom in a little bit.

00:20:22:04 – 00:21:05:28
Speaker 2
The hotspots are not as obvious, but there are a couple of black pixels. Here’s one here. It’s a little bit hotter air, this one here. So there are a couple areas where there might be some small fires that are burning. And if in the afternoon hours, once it heats up and air mass begins to dry out and the speeds of the offshore slow begin to get stronger, it is possible that those hot spots might, become a little bit larger of an area, burning.

00:21:06:22 – 00:21:36:21
Speaker 2
And if we could get back to go back to that, the other hot spot, let me, switch to this and here and go back to the time. So, yeah, here’s that hot spot that we see. You have these neighbors energy, which has the spatial resolution of one kilometer. And let’s compare that with what we see.

00:21:36:23 – 00:22:20:17
Speaker 2
What four kilometer, goes and you can see that. Yeah, you can see a hotspot and that it’s a little bit grayer, but it’s not as hot, you know, so you can’t really tell the actual magnitude of the hotspot. And it isn’t as obvious. And so if you’re trying to look for areas of burning, it really helps to have higher spatial resolution that you get from the, polar orbiting the instrument, such as a forest instrument, or if there’s an estimate and you just those are available if you want to have them.

00:22:21:00 – 00:23:01:15
Speaker 2
And so the LDM has them, Uri works and there is a lag time of only about a half an hour. And so if these aren’t bad and, so you can get access to this high spatial resolution, in a pretty small amount of time. And, the only on the topic of, high spatial resolution, I also wanted to take a look at what was going on on the East Coast.

00:23:01:17 – 00:23:35:02
Speaker 2
Where we had some areas of. All. And in the overnight hours, so here we’re looking at it on the right band. So again, this can often be used as a visible image in the night time hours. So by toggle between that and the fog product it’s it is. And then we have a have a look at the odds.

00:23:35:04 – 00:23:52:19
Speaker 2
Yes. It’s obvious that you know yes. This is a large area of fog. And if I go to other areas pane here and then go back to the right. So then.

00:23:52:22 – 00:24:23:01
Speaker 2
If I do a comparison, you know, you know what we can see here with the flares at a one kilometer resolution and then compare that with what we see. So that goes with for a kilometer. Now you can see that, With the, the high resolution, you get a lot more confidence on where the actual edges are.

00:24:23:03 – 00:25:05:04
Speaker 2
And you can also see where the fog is then the valley with a lot more confidence. And so higher spatial resolution is really going to help you out in terms of, you know, hotspots and areas. Of fog and stratus and, and all all kinds of, you know, so we encourage you to add these, to, you know, is there a website, you know, there and it’s, it’s through the all the, a lot of offices are apprehensive about a band with problems, but these aren’t gigantic products.

00:25:05:06 – 00:25:26:26
Speaker 2
And you try to get a lot of sort of models that, you know, if you have to look at all those models. So, so, you know, this might be a useful product. And so that if, if you have the bandwidth, we encourage you to add them. And you can contact us.

00:25:26:29 – 00:25:45:12
Speaker 2
Through your, your, if you have an interest and we’d be happy to help you out. And that’s all I have. Unless there are any other comments or questions.

00:25:45:15 – 00:26:11:12
Speaker 1
Okay. Thanks, Scott. That’s all we have for today. Buffalo. Do you have any just, I mean, you can if you have any open comments or questions or discussion points for us. Anything during the lake effect snow. The, events where you were saying, I wish we had, this or that in terms of, maybe an additional, product you were thinking of.

00:26:11:12 – 00:26:14:22
Speaker 1
Is there anything that comes to mind.

00:26:15:00 – 00:26:39:27
Speaker 2
As far as products? No, not at this time. We were interested in the. If you could take a close look and, give us your assessment on the super rapid scan, particularly during the morning hours of that event last week, looked like you could almost get a sense of, to lake band that were almost crossing each other over the metro Buffalo, where there was some blow off over the top.

00:26:39:27 – 00:26:52:13
Speaker 2
And you could you can kind of see it curving, some type of blow off, curving off to the north. If you could take a look at that and, you can email or email me. They’ve, they’ve, some of what you guys think of that. It was just kind of interesting.

00:26:52:16 – 00:26:54:25
Speaker 1
Okay. That’s the morning of the seventh.

00:26:54:27 – 00:26:55:24
Speaker 2
Yes, I believe so.

00:26:55:28 – 00:27:05:22
Speaker 1
Okay. Okay. I’ll definitely look at I could, bring that up pretty quickly here because The Sims, blog has that available, so I’ll definitely, look into that much, you know.

00:27:05:24 – 00:27:29:20
Speaker 2
Yeah. That’s interesting. I’m looking at it right now and it’s at the very beginning. I mean, most of the bands are going from southwest to northeast, but then there’s that one at the very beginning that kind of kinks up and kind of moves due north, just inland of Buffalo until about 1630. Then it’s gone. I don’t know if that’s what you’re talking about, but it’s, interesting.

00:27:29:22 – 00:27:55:24
Speaker 2
I mean, everything is looking like it’s coming from 290, except just downwind of Buffalo. There’s a band that’s, looks like it’s coming out of from 220 or 210 or something like. Yeah. So in the past we’ve seen, what looks to be like 2 or 3 bands over the lake, and then they, they tend to converge a little bit inland, maybe due to some type of frictional effects.

00:27:56:05 – 00:28:13:19
Speaker 2
And then they enhance and they enhance briefly over that area and then continue downwind. We were just wondering maybe that’s what we’re seeing on satellite. Not really sure. Is there any kind of like topographic funneling through there? I mean, is there it is a little bit higher south of Buffalo and a little bit higher north. So it is south.

00:28:13:22 – 00:28:18:13
Speaker 2
Funnel things through. Not really okay down in that direction. No.

00:28:18:13 – 00:28:33:16
Speaker 1
Yeah that’s interesting. Okay. Well I’ll look at that in detail here. I do have the data. So I look at that in detail and, and get back with you here. And maybe, maybe we’ll even put an additional blog, post out there on this.

00:28:33:18 – 00:28:34:16
Speaker 2
All right. Thank you.

00:28:34:18 – 00:28:36:17
Speaker 1
Okay. Well thanks, Buffalo. Have a great day.