Over the weekend I drove to Tulsa, Okla., for military training. Of course, anytime I travel south, especially in the winter, I hope for warmer temperatures. Obviously with this arctic blast, those warm temperatures were no where to be found. Another thing not to be found, the grass! My entire drive was snow covered.

I looked at the forecast models and local National Weather Service discussion before I went to bed Friday night and there were no indications of snow. When I woke up early Saturday, I began to wonder if the snow was following me. Light snow was falling during my drive onto base. I wasn’t the only person surprised by the snow, nobody was expecting it. My commander even told his boss we wouldn’t have to deal with any snow that weekend!

Once my commander and I got onto a computer to look at weather maps, we quickly learned we were dealing with “lake-effect flurries.” The winds were out of the northeast at 5 to 10 mph, with very cold arctic air between 10 and 13 degrees that morning. The conditions were exactly what was needed for lake-effect snow from Lake Oologah. This was my first time experiencing lake-effect snow from such a small lake. I’ve only ever dealt with lake-effect snow from the Great Lakes.

If you aren’t familiar with lake-effect snow, simply put, it is snow that forms when very cold air moves over warm water. Below is a simple graphic from Wikipedia that illustrates the process.

You can see the location of Tulsa in comparison to Lake Oologah on the Google map above. It is a smaller lake, but with the arctic air in place and the winds out of the northeast, the fetch of the lake was long enough for the lake-effect snow to develop.