Great Salt Lake effect
lake's influence on local weather and climate
The Great Salt Lake effect is a small but detectable influence on the local climate and weather around the Great Salt Lake in Utah, United States. In particular, snowstorms are a common occurrence over the region and have major socio-economic impacts due to their significant precipitation amounts. The Great Salt Lake almost never freezes and can warm rapidly, which allows lake enhanced precipitation to occur from September through May. Lake-enhanced snowstorms are often attributed to creating what is locally known as "The Greatest Snow on Earth".
Lake enhancement
Lake-effect snow around the Great Salt Lake is generated in a similar fashion to elsewhere in the world. However, the Great Salt Lake primarily provides a lifting mechanism and acts as an atmospheric destabilizer, which encourages convection. This is in contrast to the Great Lakes, where the lakes contribute significant amounts of moisture and latent heat.
Great Salt Lake enhanced precipitation occurs when a strong, cold, northwesterly wind blows across a relatively warm lake. This is common after a cold front passage, where the winds are predominantly northwesterly and the air is much colder than the lake. When the land-lake breeze blows towards the lake, there is a convergence zone that acts to channel the cold air over the center of the lake and further enhance precipitation.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Great Salt Lake effect” is lake's influence on local weather and climate. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Great, Salt and Lake, not as a finished interpretation.
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This entry incorporates text from “Great Salt Lake effect” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.