MeteoFrontier · Lake-effect snow

Shading band corridors 850 hPa wind weak corridors too

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Guidance, not an official warning. Our own diagnostics of the RAP and HRDPS runs. For warnings and forecasts use ECCC and NAV CANADA products.

How to use this page (1 minute)

Pick a lake with the tabs below: the map zooms to it and the panels describe that lake for the hour on the slider.
The big number is the lake-effect potential (0–100), built from the ingredients listed under it. Each gauge shows the value, its green / amber / red thresholds and how much it counts.
Corridors on the map are where bands would go for the boundary-layer wind of that hour: arrow from the upwind shore along the longest fetch, onto the downwind shore and 120 km inland.
The checklist shows every ingredient for every forecast hour; click a column to jump the map to that hour.
Airport cards give onset and end of the potential at each aerodrome, model snowfall, the raw ensemble and the FRONTIER east shadow ceiling / visibility.
Every ? opens an explainer with the physics, the thresholds and the literature.

Lake-effect potential

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Ingredients

Ingredients checklist by hour

All lakes at a glance

Airports downwind

Lake temperature and ice

How well does the index do?

Data and licences

Models: NOAA RAP 32 km (public domain) and ECCC HRDPS 2.5 km (Open Government Licence – Canada). Lake temperature and ice: the CMC analysis used by the RDPS (ECCC, Open Government Licence – Canada) and NOAA GLERL GLSEA lake means and ice concentration (public domain). Water mask: RDPS land–water fraction. Ensemble: ECCC REPS and NOAA GEFS via our Winter Storm Lab (raw, not calibrated). Coastlines: Natural Earth (public domain). FRONTIER east is our own experimental shadow guidance.