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Lake effect cloud plume in northeastern Montana

By Scott Bachmeier •

GOES-16 Nighttime Microphysics RGB and Day Snow-Fog RGB images, with surface observations plotted in yellow and highways plotted in violet; Fort Peck Lake is outlined in blue [click to play animated GIF | MP4]

GOES-16 (GOES-East) Nighttime Microphysics RGB and Day Snow-Fog RGB images (above) showed a lake effect fog/stratus plume that was meandering slowly northward from the still-unfrozen Fort Peck Lake in northeastern Montana (just south of Glasgow) on 08 December 2022.

During the hours leading up to sunrise, GOES-16 Nighttime Microphysics RGB images with an overlay of the GOES-16 Cloud Top Phase derived product (below) indicated that the majority of this lake effect fog/stratus plume had tops consisting of supercooled water droplets.

GOES-16 Nighttime Microphysics RGB images, with an overlay of the GOES-16 Cloud Top Phase derived product [click to play animated GIF | MP4]


GOES-16 Cloud Thickness product [click to play animated GIF | MP4]

The GOES-16 Cloud Thickness product (above), a component of the Fog/Low Stratus (FLS) suite, showed that this fog/stratus feature was generally 1000 feet thick or less — confined to a strong but shallow low-level temperature inversion, according to plots of rawinsonde data from Glasgow (below).

Plots of lower-tropospheric rawinsonde data from Glasgow, Montana at 0000 UTC (yellow) and 1200 UTC (cyan) [click to enlarge]

Once this fog/stratus plume began to move over Glasgow shortly after 1000 UTC, their surface observations revealed frequent fluctuations in the surface visibility, along with periods of freezing fog and occasionally some light snow (below). In addition, these conditions likely had an impact on travel along US Highway 2 (which runs northwest-to-southeast through the Glasgow area).

Plot of surface observation data from Glasgow, Montana [click to enlarge]

Categories: Fog detection, GOES-16, Red-Green-Blue (RGB) images, Winter weather