What a shot!
Floridian here (I know, I know) - this is completely foreign to me. What am I looking at? Is that just a huge down burst of… snow?
Cold air from the north moves over a large body of water which is (relatively) warmer and thus takes up warmth and humidity.
It then hits the cold shore, causing air temperatures to drop again as well. Colder air can carry less humidity, so it nearly instantly forms into heavy fog and clouds.
As air can move more swiftly over water than over land, it also gets “compressed” slightly upon hitting the shore, which can lead to the just-formed clouds to thicken up enough to cause heavy snowfall.
EDIT: what you see on this photo is the superhumid air condensing into fog and clouds.
As harmless as high humidity and stalled air in winter times can be. Mostly fog, sometimes very intense snowfall. 🤷♂️
Pretty much. Buffalo routinely gets hosed by blizzard conditions that don’t usually affect the cities on the northern side of the same lake (Toronto, Mississauga, etc). It’s feature of being on the south side of one of the Great Lakes.
I remember hearing about one year where Buffalo got 6 feet overnight, or some other complete bullshit.
Thanks! So is this a legit “blizzard” in the pic just rolling up on them out of nowhere?
I live on the eastern shore of lake Erie, and we easily got 3 feet of snow since Thanksgiving. It’s so deep that I can’t even use my snow blower to clear the driveway.
Where my in-laws live in northern Quebec multiple companies offer driveway snow removal services where they send a large tractor. On one end is a large (expandable) blade that they use to pull the snow down to the street and on the other end is an auger they use to throw it up into the yard. They come multiple times to allow you to move cars or just keep up with ongoing snowfall.
I’ve never seen that anywhere else; is that a service in your area?
Not that I’m aware of. There are a bunch of local contractors that will plow your driveway for a nominal fee, but my neighbor has a tractor with a snow plow attachment and thankfully dug out the driveway. That was Friday, and it snowed so much in between now and then that it took me 2 hours to use my snow blower today. And we don’t have a long driveway.
Snow Ape.
Damn Buffalo! Why you so scary???