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Home Blog Lake Effect... Rain??

Lake Effect... Rain??

Posted on July 31, 2020

You've heard of lake-effect snow, that quirky winter phenomenon that occurs on our side of Lake Michigan... but did you know that lake-effect rain is a thing too? In fact, we just experienced some on Wednesday of this week. So what exactly is it, and what makes it happen? 

Lake-effect precipitation—whether we are talking snow or rain—is formed when the water temperature of the lake on its surface is significantly warmer than that of the air at about 5,000 feet up. Much like the steam coming off a pot of boiling water on your stove, this temperature difference causes surface water to evaporate and rise forming a cloud, which following usual weather patterns, moves over the water from west to east. When this cloud hits the eastern shore, the precipitation gets released… in cold weather, it appears as snow, in warmer weather, it’s rain.

So for lake-effect rain to happen we need pretty warm lake water relative to the air. And boy howdy, do we have warm water temperatures this year! In fact, the temperatures in the Great Lakes are breaking records. Lake Michigan’s average water temp hit 75.1 degrees F on July 8. It’s typically averaging around 64 degrees at this point in the summer. Lake Erie’s average water temp reached a stunning 79.6 degrees F on July 10! 

Why is the water so abnormally warm this summer? Because it has been so abnormally hot, with very little rain. And while the warmer water is pretty nice to swim in, it’s not so great for water quality and aquatic life, creating conditions ripe for blue-green algae blooms that can harm fish and make people exposed to it sick.

So we’ve got the warm water part of the lake-effect equation, and mid-week, we had much cooler weather roll in. Meteorologists have determined that there needs to be around 25-degree temperature difference between the water surface and the air at 5,000 feet for the lake-effect to occur. With the water temp at about 75 degrees, on Wednesday, the air temp at that height was about 51 degrees… viola! Lake-effect rain. This is why we had those weird rain showers pop up out of nowhere late Wednesday afternoon.

You don’t really hear about lake-effect rain as much, because the conditions necessary to create it rarely occur in the summer. When the air is consistently warm, it’s pretty hard to reach that 25-degree temperature differential. But with water temps so unusually warm right now, it’s far more likely to happen. Because in 2020, nothing can just be normal, can it?