Photo courtesy NASA
In the third year of its 13-year service life, NASA's Sea-Viewing Wide Field-of-View Sensor, a satellite-borne imager, SeaWIFS for short, captured this fabulous picture of lake-effect snow being created by the Great Lakes, North America's freshwater inland seas. Cold winds sweeping down from the frigid Canadian plains on December 5th, 2000, pick up heat and moisture from Lake Nipigon, Lake Superior, and Lake Michigan, creating clouds which deposit snow further downwind.
In this picture you can see the entire State of Wisconsin, from the Western boundary tracing the Mississippi River to the coastline of Lake Michigan, its Eastern boundary. At the crook of the "thumb" is the small city of Green Bay. Chicago, Illinois, the largest city in the American Midwest, is in the clear patch to the left of the lowermost visible portion of the Lake; its effluent registers as a lighter color of blue in the picture. The "Wolf's Head" of Lake Superior is clearly seen.
The outline of Lake Superior, northernmost of the five Great Lakes, is thought to resemble a wolf's head. Lake Michigan, at the lower left, is the only lake entirely within the boundaries of the United States; the other four lie between the United States and Canada.
SeaWIFS was created to collect ocean biological data and was primarily designed to quantify chlorophyll produced by marine phytoplankton. Its images are in the public domain unless used for commercial purposes. SeaWIFS ended its service life in 2010.
Mike
(Thanks to NASA and Wikipedia)
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Rob de Loe: "Shout out to the United States and Canada for over a century of successful cooperation managing (and avoiding) water problems across the international boundary! The Boundary Waters Treaty was completed in 1909, and since that day the International Joint Commission (a bi-national body created under the Treaty) has been helping Canada and the US protect and restore the Great Lakes and our other shared boundary waters. If you're not a water person you might not even be aware of this amazing success story.
"P.S. The image is fantastic. I love photographs that are a bit ambiguous and borderline abstract."
Mike, have you seen these incredible photos?
https://petapixel.com/2015/12/10/photographer-captures-powerful-waves-on-lake-erie-as-liquid-mountains/?fbclid=IwAR3qscwhHuIj3ERCehvObVMPd4OW5BjLNPQfxyBY1AMUB_a1L0STHehIZEo
Posted by: Dave Jenkins | Monday, 09 March 2020 at 11:46 AM
I love this stuff. It reminded me of this NASA photo from a few years back showing Canada's Maritime provinces (where I live) encased in ice during the awful winter of 2015. The photo shows the provinces of New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia in full with part of the State of Maine on the left and the Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec being the big 'arm' along the top. I'm on the south edge of Nova Scotia, just east of the two big "notches" of water by the next small notch (Halifax harbour/Bedford basin).
And your post also immediately conjured one of my own photos from 2017, showing some just barely frozen 'dark nilas' ice off of the edge of a walking bridge across the St. John River in Fredericton, NB. To me, it's always looked like a satellite photo in the vein of the one you've presented - with a snowy mountain range intruding from the right, some deep blue water, warmer brown 'land', a couple meteor strikes, and that hard oblique line perhaps being a highway cutting through the area. I'm not one for printing big, but I'd love to make something large out of this one some day. The small web JPG obscures a lot of the texture and detail, of course.
Posted by: Adam Lanigan | Monday, 09 March 2020 at 12:14 PM
If you're interested in learning more about the ecology and history of the Great Lakes, I can highly recommend "The Death and Life of the Great Lakes" by Dan Egan.
Posted by: ASW | Monday, 09 March 2020 at 03:08 PM
When I went to RIT in the 1970s, RIT being south of the lake would have blue sky and houses near the lake could get over a foot of snow on that same day. On another day lake effect snow, and not a blizzard, buried my VW Beetle overnight till only the antenna was sticking above the snow in the morning. Worst time was when I started to hike up one frozen gorge in the finger lakes in the morning only to return to my Beetle being totally covered by lake effect snow and also plowed in on the side of the road... and that was on one early spring day.
Posted by: Greg | Monday, 09 March 2020 at 07:32 PM
"...its (Chicago's) effluent registers as a lighter color of blue in the picture." Sorry Mike, but Chicago does not discharge any effluent to Lake Michigan. After it reversed the flow of the Chicago River many years ago all of its wastes flow into the Illinois River and then to the Mississippi River.
Posted by: David Kee | Monday, 09 March 2020 at 11:27 PM
Looks a bit like Trump’s hairdo, doesn’t it?
For a fascinating LIVE data-driven view of America’s wind pattern try Wind Map. It’s been part of my daily weather check routine for years. Informative and beautiful, especially during boundary seasons.
Posted by: Kenneth Tanaka | Tuesday, 10 March 2020 at 10:47 AM
Sorry to spoil the party but Line #5 runs directly under the Straights of Mackinaw....a line that contains oil headed to a Marathon refinery
in Detroit. The line which dates back to the 1950's is a threat to
20+% of the planets fresh water. Michigan's current governor has
attempted to shut this line down, but the republican legislature has blocked all of her attempts. The Canadian company, Enbridge has a
history of pipeline ruptures and a very poor environmental record.
Line #5 is not necessary because the oil could be shipped through
existing pipelines that are in Wisconsin. So...someday if nothing is done, the aerial image will be painted black....it is not a question of if....it is only a question of when.
Posted by: Mark | Tuesday, 10 March 2020 at 01:27 PM
Early Narratives of the Northwest: 1634-1699, edited by Louise Phelps Kellogg(1917) is journals and excerpts of Catholic priests and others making early contact with the nations living in exactly the area shown in the photograph. I’ve had my nose in it for the past week or two.
Red and white didn’t long take their minds off the business of getting by in that environment.
Posted by: Mark Jennings | Tuesday, 10 March 2020 at 04:40 PM
I just stumbled onto this more close up view
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vo1BzyBwZ1E
Apparently there is a surfing scene in Lake Michigan in the winter.
Posted by: hugh crawford | Tuesday, 10 March 2020 at 08:11 PM