Lake Effect snow sort of feels like a bully. It sits around, dumps a bunch of stuff on us for as long as it wants, then it carries on its merry way.
We’re used to that. But West Michigan didn’t just get more of the usual lake effect snow this week. We may have experienced something much rarer: steam effect snow.
We’re all painfully familiar with lake effect at this point, especially the way one town gets buried while the next one over barely needs a broom. Steam effect snow, though, is a whole different animal that is even more area specific and it doesn’t show up very often.
On rare occasions, the atmosphere lines up just right for steam from local industrial sources, like factories, to actually help create snow. When warm steam rises and runs into air that’s already fully saturated and sitting in the dendritic growth zone, (which is basically the sweet spot where snowflakes form) light snow showers can develop. From there, the wind carries them downstream like a tiny, hyper-localized snow cloud…