November 1996: Record-Setting Lake-Effect Snow | WeatherBug
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November 1996: Record-Setting Lake-Effect Snow

December 1, 2020
By WeatherBug's Christopher Smith
November is traditionally when cold blasts pushing across the warm Great Lakes fire off rounds of heavy, intense snow squalls for the snow belts. While the lake-effect machine has been turned off much of this month due to the lack of cold outbreaks, we look back to November 1996 when record-setting lake-effect snow brought a few snowbelt towns to a standstill. Yard sticks were needed to measure the snow in a few cases and hundreds of thousands lost power.

The lake-effect snow machine cranked up as soon as the calendar flipped to November for the eastern Great Lakes. On Friday, November 1, 1996, an upper-level trough and reinforcing shot of cold air started the snow guns off Lakes Erie and Ontario. The snow bands persisted through November 3 and when all was set and done, southwest of Jamestown, N.Y., racked up more than 6 inches and Highmarket, N.Y., tallied 18 inches.

Heading a bit later into the month, the attention for lake-effect snow shifted southwest. A deep upper-level trough swung through the Great Lakes again, this time on November 9. The cold, Northwest wind sweeping across the relatively warm Lake Erie triggered heavy lake-effect snow bands across northeast Ohio and western Pennsylvania that lasted for nearly a week until November 14.

Snow totals for this November lake-effect snow event were much more impressive than the first one of November 1996. The environment was not only favorable for heavy snow, but thundersnow contributed to extreme snowfall rates. More than 20 inches of snow accumulated in Cleveland and areas east of the city had to shovel anywhere between 2 and 5 feet. Hambden Township, Ohio, got walloped with a staggering 68.9 inches of snow, that’s more than 5 feet! It was enough to become the largest snowfall on record for Ohio.

The record-setting snow across northeast Ohio caused major tree damage and power outages, with up to 168,000 customers left in the dark. Schools across the area also closed for a few days and near 100 flights out of Cleveland Hopkins International Airport were cancelled.

November 2020 has been a stark contrast to November 1996. The lake-effect snow machine has been sputtering this month since the cold blasts have been short-lived and far and few between. The rest of the month looks mild before a cold blast returns right in time to flip the calendar to December.

Sources: weather.gov, Schmidlin, T. W., & Kosarik, J. (n.d.). A Record Ohio Snowfall during 9-14 November 1996. https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0477(1999)080<1107:AROSDN>2.0.CO;2
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Story Image: NASA captures a classic lake-effect snow from space on December 5, 2000. Lake-effect snow was record-setting in 1996 (Wikimedia Commons/SeaWiFS Project, NASA).