Update on 07 December lake effect snowfall

Here is an image I composited showing the snowfall pattern over northern Indiana. The yellow shading indicates snow cover, with the brightest yellow being the deepest snow. Downtown Fort Wayne lies on the eastern fringe of a very sharply defined swath of snow extending southeastward from Lake Michigan.

The pile-up on I-69 was in the swath of snow that borders Bluffton (in Wells County, south of Fort Wayne). I-69 travels along the border of Wells and Huntington counties; the accidents occurred in the snowy area along that boundary and to the south of the river (the Wabash River) shown on the map overlay.

As you can see, the lake effect snow extended a lot further than I originally surmised. The one band that passes just west of Bluffton extends as far south as the Dayton, OH, area (actually halfway between Eaton, which is visible in this image, and Dayton).

Image Details

I used AVHRR data (taken by NOAA's Polar Orbiting Satellites) which I downloaded from the John Hopkins University Advanced Physics Lab website. This is data from the Day Pass of NOAA-18 stamped 2006 Dec 08 19:04 UT (in JHU/APL Northcentral US section). See the full image here. I used an Indiana map obtained from the University of Texas Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection. I enlarged the AVHRR image a bit and enhanced it some to make the snow stand out better. I rotated and scaled the Indiana map to fit the state outlines on the AVHRR image. Finally, I overlaid the AVHRR image with the state map, and made the map transparent so the AVHRR data would show through.

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awc 2006-12-08 17:34:22