A prolonged heavy lake effect snow event took place off of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie December 25-26 2017. By the morning of the 26th, up to two feet of snow had already been reported in some areas of New York state just off the lakes. Up to an additional couple feet of snow was forecast through the morning of the 27th. To support forecasters during the event, GOES-16 1-min imagery was requested over the region. The high spatial resolution visible 1-min imagery from GOES-16 allows forecasters to precisely track the evolution of the narrow convective snow bands both in space and time (Figure 1).

Figure 1: 26 December 2017 GOES-16 1-min 0.64 um visible imagery over western New York state. Full res

– Bill Line, NWS