mdk
Diamond Member
- Sep 6, 2014
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The early 70's the entire Midwest was taking shots off the great lakes. I remember the TV news casts showing those folks dumping truck loads of snow off the bridges in NY, Buffalo, Philadelphia, and a few other areas..
New York and Philadelphia don't get lake effect snow. They have no lake to their west.
Doesn't require it to be west. Only in line with current wind direction.. And it can also pick up moisture, increase in altitude and deposit it up to 100 miles away. If you want to get technical about it...
Weather moves from west to east because of the rotation of the earth, unless it's a hurricane which goes backward. And again, neither city has a lake within 100 miles. Erie and Ontario are more like 400. Too far.
Look, I'm from there, I know what the weather is.
Lake effect is a poor descriptor of this phenomenon as it can happen above large rivers or any other body of water that is significantly warmer than the air mass above it.
"River effect"?
Don't think so. And even if it did work that way, those cities don't have large rivers to their west either. The Schuylkill isn't big, and it comes down from the north anyway.
I've never heard of "river effect snow" but it is common to have "bay effect snow" in certain areas. The Hudson, Chesapeake, and Massachusetts Bays have been known to produce a similar effect.