Lake and Mountain Effects

We're seeing some nice lake-effect snow squalls moving off the Great Salt Lake this morning.  Also evident in the radar loop below are persistent orographic snow showers (orographic is just a fancy word for mountain) in the high terrain surrounding the Cottonwoods.

I suspect the lake-effect will weaken and become more scattered this afternoon, as is typically the case during these events, especially in the spring.  The graph below shows how the frequency of lake-effect tends to decline during the day, especially in the spring (purple bars).

Number of days with lake-effect at a given time of day.
Source: Alcott et al. (2012)