BUFFALO — The region’s legendary snowfall totals are largely the result of one unlucky geographic reality: the city sits east of the Great Lakes instead of west.
Anyone who has lived through a winter in Buffalo, Cleveland or any snowbelt city knows that prevailing westerly winds pick up moisture from the lakes and dump lake-effect snow on their eastern shores.
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In this 2015 satellite image, the Great Lakes are almost completely covered in ice. A new study suggests that, during the last Ice Age, winds likely pushed lake-effect snow toward the lakes’ western shores instead of the eastern snowbelt cities familiar today. Photo courtesy of NOAA/NASA/NESDIS Environmental Visualization Laboratory.
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