Snow, freezing rain and 50-degree January days may seem like abnormal weather to have over the course of a few days, but for Wayne County, the past week’s weather was just another unpredictable winter week.
Lake Ontario, the Great Lake that borders the northern towns of Wayne County, plays a critical role in the county’s weather during all four seasons. But anyone who has spent a winter in the area knows that lake-effect snow can be unpredictable and sporadic.
According to Jon Hitchcock of the National Weather Service in Buffalo, the parts of Wayne County farthest south receive around 70 inches of snow per year and the northeast corner gets upwards of 100 inches.
“About 40-50 inches is from general weather systems moving through and all of the rest is lake-effect snow,” Hitchcock said.
Lake-effect snow forms when cold air flows over a relatively warm lake and picks up moisture. More importantly, according to Hitchcock, it makes the air more unstable over the lake, so it bubbles up into bands of clouds that eventually drop snow downwind of the lake.
“So, you’ll have a very narrow band of snow – one, two or three inches per hour – and just a few miles away, the sun could be shining,” Hitchcock explained. “That’s just because lake-effect snow tends to form in these very narrow bands, parallel to the wind.”
During the summer, Hitchcock said that the lake plays a completely opposite role than during winter. Throughout spring and summer, he said that the lake is colder and the air is warmer, which suppresses cloud cover and rain development.
“Another influence is a longer growing season by the lake,” he added. “The last frost dates in the spring are much earlier in Wayne County than points further inland like the Southern Tier, and that’s why Wayne County is such a great place to grow apples and other fruits.”
“Wayne County is very fortunate in that lake effect snow is the largest culprit we generally have to deal with here,” said George Bastedo, Director of Emergency Management for Wayne County.
“We do not have to contend with the hurricanes, and other natural disasters of other parts of the country,” he added.
Lake Ontario also typically weakens thunderstorms as they come across from the northwest. One storm in particular though, the 1998 Labor Day storm, didn’t weaken as it came across the lake, and caused significant damage to parts of Wayne County before moving through Syracuse.
Hitchcock said the ‘98 Labor Day storm began as a line of thunderstorms that developed near Toronto and Niagara Falls and then formed into a specialized type of storm called a derecho. Derecho is a term for a line of thunderstorms that last a long time and produce wind damage over a large area.
Although they were straight-line winds and no tornadoes formed, Hitchcock said there were recorded wind gusts of over 100 m.p.h. in Syracuse.
The Village of Clyde and Town of Galen received significant damage during the storm. Current Galen Town Supervisor Steve Groat, who was mayor of Clyde at the time, said that it took weeks before they cleaned up the damage.
“Down by my corner, there was a tree blocking the intersection,” Groat recalled. “I remember we had to take heavy equipment – we were trying to do this in the middle of the night while it was still raining – and move trees out of the way. But before we got them all cut up and taken out, it was probably two or three weeks.”
Another extremely rare storm that hit Wayne County during the past 20 years was the ice storm in April of 2003, which caused significant damage to powerlines, trees and orchards and left parts of the county without power for days.
Hitchcock said that ice storms form when there is a layer of freezing cold air that is shallow, just a few hundred feet from the surface, and above that layer of cold air the temperature is above freezing. Rain coming from the warmer air freezes as it passes through the layer of cold air before reaching the surface.
“In April of ‘03, that happened for a long time so it allowed a lot of freezing rain to build up, which caused extensive damage to trees and power lines,” Hitchcock said. “It’s a little unusual to get that in early April. That’s more typically a mid-winter setup, so it was unusually late for that to happen.”
Regarding last year’s mild winter, Hitchcock said it was a direct result of one of the strongest El Niño’s on record. El Niño is a weather cycle that is caused by warmer than normal water in the tropical Pacific Ocean. Since the Pacific Ocean is the largest in the world, Hitchcock said that it change the weather patterns for a significant part of the globe, including all of the U.S.
“That El Niño weakened over the summer, and it is completely gone,” Hitchcock assured. “Water temperatures are a little cooler than normal in the Pacific [this year], so we expect that to result in a near normal winter.”
The post Wayne County’s Weather: It’s all about that Lake Effect appeared first on Times of Wayne County.