Hobart and William Smith Colleges

21 November 2025 • Alums • Research • STEM The Hidden Forces Behind Lake-Effect Snow By Mary Stone

HWS alumni reveal hidden atmospheric forces driving the blizzards that define winters across the Great Lakes.

Inhabitants near the Great Lakes accept the fickleness of lake-effect snow as a way of life. An experienced Western New York driver struggling to see in whiteout conditions one moment is unsurprised to find clear skies, dry pavement and green grass a few miles down the road.

For decades, meteorologists have known lake-effect snow occurs when cold air sweeps over a comparatively warm lake surface, picking up heat and moisture that fuel intense snowfall. But new research led by Ian C. Beckley ’20, now a Ph.D. candidate in atmospheric science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, reveals a more complicated explanation.

Subtle atmospheric disturbances a few miles overhead can dramatically shape the weather we experience on land. Understanding the disturbances better can allow for more precise weather forecasting. Better predictability of lake-effect snow, Beckley says, can potentially save lives and provide economic benefits, such as better road management during winter storms simply by being aware of how snow bands are influenced once they start.

A research article “Interactions between Short-Wave Troughs and Shore-Parallel Lake-Effect Bands over Lake Ontario,” recently published in the American Meteorological Society’s journal Weather and Forecasting, was co-authored by Beckley, Elliott Morrill ’15, Shay Callahan ’17, Gabby Linscott ’21 and Associate Provost and Associate Professor of Geoscience Nick Metz, building on more than a decade of collaborative research led by Metz.

The research started with a multi-institutional field campaign called OWLeS — the Ontario Winter Lake-Effect Systems project — which brought together six universities to study snow bands over Lake Ontario. Specifically, they looked at the formation mechanisms, cloud microphysics and dynamics of lake-effect systems using new tools that provided more details than previous experiments could.

“We had scientists from Illinois, Wyoming, Utah, Pennsylvania and others,” Metz recalls. “It was a great opportunity for our students to be involved. Lake-effect snow impacts our lives here every winter, and we wanted to understand why sometimes you get blinding snow in one place and nothing just a few miles away.”

During those field observations in 2014, Metz and other researchers noticed something strange: the snow band they were tracking was oscillating north and south — “almost like a pendulum,” Metz says. The team later discovered these movements coincided with the passage of lower-level atmospheric disturbances known as short-wave troughs — ripples in the jet stream roughly five to 10 kilometers above the ground, moving west to east.

These disturbances, though small, can profoundly influence how storms develop below, Metz’s team found. The findings challenged the established and simplified understanding that lake effect snow was simply caused by cold air over warm water. Yet, Metz says, no one had looked at this before.

At the time, the team documented the case and presented it at several scientific meetings but nothing more. “We had this really interesting example from January 2014,” Metz explains, “but other projects took priority.”

Morrill and Callahan picked up the case study and conducted further analyses they later presented at American Meteorological Society meetings. Several of their initial analyses, Beckley says, appear in the final manuscript published this year.

Beckley and Linscott subsequently expanded Callahan and Morrill’s work to determine how frequently this phenomenon occurs. 

As a junior, Beckley spent his summer alongside Metz and Jared Klein, the Science and Operations Officer at the National Weather Service Forecast Office in Binghamton, N.Y., cataloging dozens of lake-effect snow events to see how often short-wave troughs interacted with active snow bands. “This was the grunt work required to produce the event climatology,” Beckley remembers.

As a paid research assistant the following year, Beckley began compiling the results into a manuscript.

After Beckley left for graduate school, Linscott kept the project moving by validating his catalog and re-organizing his manuscript. “When I received the revised manuscript from her, we were in a great position to move forward,” Beckley says.

After learning additional computational skills in graduate school, Beckley returned to the research to better objectively argue their hypothesis, he says.

What had begun for Beckley as painstaking “grunt work” in 2019 was turning into a remarkable finding: the 2014 case wasn’t a one-off. These interactions were surprisingly common. “In science, you can always find one interesting case,” Metz notes. “But if you can show that something happens repeatedly, then you can start treating it as a real, predictable pattern. That’s exactly what Ian did.”

Metz says the article has practical applications for improving weather forecasting in the Great Lakes region and is a great example of scientific discovery.

"It’s really exciting to make the discovery to see that connection. And it's funny, right? It was not the intent of the project when we were there in 2014. Observing that band is part of what scientists do,” Metz says. “Sometimes it’s just about paying attention.” 

Top: During “Hydrometeorology,” Professor of Geoscience Nick Metz reviews the weather forecast at the start of class.