Lake adds extra punch to snowfalls

For more than a week in February 1998, Tosh Kano was directing fellow employees of the Salt Lake County Public Works Department, he and the rest working 12-hour shifts, struggling to clear deep snow although crews were exhausted.

"Even though (there were) very small accumulations in the Magna and Kearns area, we wind up with 11 or 12 inches' accumulation in the benches," said Kano, who commanded the snow-clearing effort. Today a consultant for the public works for Holladay and Taylorsville, he vividly remembers the huge storm of a decade ago.

"We had a crew spread throughout the county. I had to take, for example, people from the west side and help the people on the east side because the accumulation of the snow depth was two or three times that on the west side," he said.

The spottiness of snowfall during that fierce storm happened because of a strange weather hazard shared by Utah and a few other states: the lake effect.

Under special circumstances produced by the lake effect, powerful storm bands sweep off a large lake, stall above some areas and skip others, and just dump snow, sometimes for days. While one small region is walloped, nearby locales may have little or no precipitation.

Sometimes the lake may contribute moisture to the snowstorm, but the lake effect could occur with the extra water vapor.

The lake effect has been known and feared around the Great Lakes for decades. In late December 2001, the effect was blamed for hitting Buffalo, N.Y., with 82 inches of snow in less than a week.

Utah's records are less dramatic, but storms spawned by the Great Salt

Lake can drop deep snow when bands of precipitation park themselves. In October 1984, a lake-effect storm deposited 27 inches of snow at the greatest accumulation point.

"We had 18 inches of snow at the airport in 24 hours," said Chris Gibson, meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Salt Lake City. "It was really a major event."

While the lake effect had been infamous for many years near the Great Lakes, weather scientists generally did not recognize it in connection with the Great Salt Lake until the big storms of the 1980s.