Where squalls persist.
You know there are parts of the country that never hear a weather man say this phrase and there are parts of the country where this is the fall back. It is the short answer to, we really don't know how much snow/rain you are going to get so we say, "where squalls persist." The problem is, at least in northeast Ohio, that these squalls can be spotty. This morning I left my house, drove less than seven miles to the Family Life Center where I meet a knitting group on Thursday mornings. I drive through a river valley, through downtown Chagrin Falls (over the river again), and out of town another couple of miles. When I left my house it was sunny so I put on my sunglasses to counter the reflection off the snow. As I started down the hill into the river valley I noticed the cars ahead of me really slowing down as they went around the curve and when I rounded the curve I noticed that it was snowing and people were going really slowly over the bridge and up the hill on the other side. The roads were slippery and had not been cleared as well as at my house. I had only gone a few miles. As it turned out I was following one of those squalls and what I was seeing was not an area that had not been properly tended to by a road crew but an area where a squall had persisted. By the time I got out to the highway the Family Life Center was on I was on a road that was snow covered and in definite need of a plow and some salt/cinders/sand or whatever that little berg uses on the streets. At the Family Life Center there was a guy trying to keep up with plowing the snow although he seemed to be going over the same area again and again. Between the falling snow and the wind it was a hard job. BUT, by the time I had dropped off my newspapers at the recycling dumpster and parked my car the squall was over and the sun was out, just like when I left my house, only here there was at least four more inches of snow then at my house. Sigh.
I remember rain like this in Florida. We lived in Tampa and in Orlando and in both places the sea breezes would meet and just dump what moisture they had accumulated. You could be in flooded streets in one area and go just a few blocks and find it had not rained at all. I remember one time I was at the library and went running home because I had clothes on the line only to find it had not rained at my house at all and that was one block over and four blocks up. They just called it patchy rain there. I guess they hadn't heard the line "where squalls persist."
Of course if Lake Erie would just freeze over the whole lake affect snow problem would just go away, but we have been vascillating from cold to warm to cold and there are still open places on the lake and even where there is ice it is not very thick so the wind can move it around. We could feasibly go all winter without it freezing enough to make a difference. So that leaves us more at the mercy of the wind direction then at the mercy of this frontal boundary or that frontal boundary because it is the wind over the lake that causes the squalls that dump the snow. This is what makes living on the Great Lakes such an interesting experience. Now, don't you all just want to spend a winter here? TTFN.
I remember rain like this in Florida. We lived in Tampa and in Orlando and in both places the sea breezes would meet and just dump what moisture they had accumulated. You could be in flooded streets in one area and go just a few blocks and find it had not rained at all. I remember one time I was at the library and went running home because I had clothes on the line only to find it had not rained at my house at all and that was one block over and four blocks up. They just called it patchy rain there. I guess they hadn't heard the line "where squalls persist."
Of course if Lake Erie would just freeze over the whole lake affect snow problem would just go away, but we have been vascillating from cold to warm to cold and there are still open places on the lake and even where there is ice it is not very thick so the wind can move it around. We could feasibly go all winter without it freezing enough to make a difference. So that leaves us more at the mercy of the wind direction then at the mercy of this frontal boundary or that frontal boundary because it is the wind over the lake that causes the squalls that dump the snow. This is what makes living on the Great Lakes such an interesting experience. Now, don't you all just want to spend a winter here? TTFN.