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We began our quest with the most obvious of searches: we typed "lake effect" (including the quotation marks) into the Yahoo! search box and were quickly rewarded with a pair of promising sites. Because of the great comment for one of the sites -- "an explanation of what causes lake effect snow" -- we headed to an article from USA Today. Titled "Intense Temperature Contrast Fuels Thundersnow Near Great Lakes," the article explains the phenomenon known as "lake effect." Lake effect snow is caused by the temperature contrast between cold air moving over warm water. The water heats the
bottom layer of air from below, causing moisture to evaporate into the air. Since warm air is lighter and less dense than cold air, the heated air rises, then begins to cool, and eventually forms clouds. When enough moisture condenses out of the air, snow falls over the regions downwind of the Great Lakes. The greater the temperature contrast between the cold air and the warm water, the heavier the snow showers are. We headed back to the initial search results and clicked on another site. Simply titled Lake Effect Snow, it turned out to be a personal web page published by someone at Syracuse University. The page explains why lake effect snow occurs at Lake Ontario and also includes a glossary and an easy-to-understand
diagram. Finally, we traveled over to Weather.com and performed a search on the term. The resulting definition confirmed our earlier findings: lake effect snow occurs when a mass of cold air moves over a body of warmer water and creates an unstable temperature profile in the atmosphere. This causes the formation of clouds that eventually develop into snow showers and squalls as they move downwind.
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