Students taking part in the Lake-Effect Electrification study launch a huge weather balloon with attached instrumentation to measure conditions inside a winter storm cloud.
The groundbreaking work of SUNY Oswego meteorology faculty and students continues to make illuminating discoveries about the phenomenon of lake-effect lightning.
Directed by SUNY Oswego meteorology faculty members Scott Steiger and Yonggang Wang, the National Science Foundation-funded Lake-Effect Electrification (LEE) project helped 22 students take part in field research chasing lake-effect storms around the region, while every summer between 2023 and 2025 allowing for four students to perform data analysis.
Their main discovery was that the addition of wind turbines around Lake Ontario has drastically altered both the frequency of lightning during winter lake-effect storms, as well as where lightning strikes.
The project, titled "Lake-Effect Electrification (LEE) and the Impacts of Wind Turbines on Electrification East of Lake Ontario,” earned more than $1 million in NSF funding to pay student researchers as well as bring in the Doppler on Wheels mobile unit from the University of Illinois to provide an up-close, state-of-the-art experience for students.
For Steiger, a longtime Oswego professor and alumnus, the topic has been of great interest for decades, and previous research paved the way. In 2009, an Oswego research team found most lake-effect lightning took place over the lake, which made sense given its status as a large warm body, or within 10 miles of shore. But that changed within a few years, when faculty and students took part in the massive Ontario Winter Lake-effect Systems (OWLeS) study in 2013-14.
“We found the main areas of lake-effect lightning were off the lake and further inland,” Steiger said. Robert Ballentine, who has since retired from the meteorology faculty, looked at the map and observed, “Isn’t that where the wind turbines are?,” Steiger recalled.
It was “a lightbulb moment,” he said, and the meteorology program’s national reputation and connections with colleagues and conferences led to five universities partnering for the NSF grant to specifically study this phenomenon. Since Wang had also participated in the OWLeS study while at the University of Wyoming before joining the Oswego faculty in 2020, he was excited to continue this research.
The Oswego team, joined by colleagues from other universities and institutions, went into the field with the Doppler on Wheels storm-chasing unit, large weather balloons and instrumentation from November 2022 to February 2023 across the Tug Hill Plateau, an elevated area east of Lake Ontario known for heavy lake-effect activity. The team also deployed around 20 lightning-detecting sensors around the Tug Hill region during the research period, September 2022 to March 2023
“Our hypothesis was confirmed,” Steiger said. “About half of the strikes we found with lake-effect lightning were because of wind turbines.”
With an increasing number of wind turbines emerging to support a more sustainable form of energy, the study points to a need to assess how to deal with potential damage and whether it poses any threat to people, even if it is a fairly uncommon weather phenomenon. While wind turbines stood out in this study because of their size and height, this research might apply to taller buildings and other structures as well –- broadening the impact of the work.
“It was very scientifically interesting,” Steiger said. “Nobody has really studied how electrification gets separated in lake effect storms. This was an opportunity for us to map out lightning in multiple dimensions.”
Student researchers (from left) Zoe Bush and Sarah Gryskewicz hold a field meter during research on lake-effect lightning. (Photo courtesy of Zoe Bush)
Students thrive through research
For many in the region, their introduction to the phenomenon is the first time they hear thundersnow, or a loud clap during a snowstorm. For participating Oswego students, this interaction was much more intensive.
Some students participating in both the field research and data analysis found it life-changing –- through co-authoring papers in prestigious journals to presenting at major conferences like the American Meteorological Society (AMS) annual meeting to bolstering their knowledge and confidence to altering their career trajectories.
For some student participants – like meteorology major Sarah Gryskewicz of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania – it was an eye-opening introduction to field research. Gryskewicz did the fieldwork as a member of the ballooning team as a freshman.
“I remember thinking: I’m a part of this huge field campaign while just last year I was in high school,” Gryskewicz recalled. “I didn’t have a background in fieldwork. But I gained a lot of good experience. We had workshops on coding and on working with the data.”
The ballooning team was responsible for launching massive weather balloons with instruments that entered lake-effect clouds to measure relevant factors. Every intensive observation period, or IOP, was a remarkable experience for hands-on learning not readily available to most university students, especially undergraduates.
Zoe Bush, a meteorology major from Stillwater, Minnesota, had done SUNY Oswego’s Storm Chasers class –- where Steiger and a student team travel across the nation’s Tornado Alley for opportunities to study twisters –- as a freshman, and was happy to get this experience as a sophomore.
“After the first couple of IOPs, I thought: This is fun, launching these giant balloons in the middle of nowhere,” Bush said. “Really, this was fun.”
Gryskewicz agreed: “I thought it was really fun,” she said. “It could be cold, it could be windy, it could be brutal, but we had a lot of good times in the field. The scientists we worked with were wonderful.”
Steiger praised the students’ commitment, including one IOP under a lake-effect band that remained in place for 14 hours near the town of Adams, where students gladly stayed in the field to study it overnight.
Kaitlin Farrell, a meteorology major from nearby Central Square, took part in the summer analysis in 2024. She said she was the least-experienced member of the team going into the work, but received many opportunities to learn and grow.
“It was definitely quite the experience,” Farrell recalled. “It made me learn coding a lot faster, learning about what the weather systems were doing, what triggered the lightning and where the locations were. Studying the data made me realize this was definitely my passion.”
In addition to the LEE study, Bush and Farrell also participated in the National Eclipse Ballooning Project, studying atmospheric impacts from the April 2024 total eclipse over Central New York and the October 2023 annular eclipse over New Mexico, thanks to NASA and NSF funding.
The students said working in the LEE project changed what they wanted to do with their futures, and that scientists they worked with were impressed and said they were willing to help with recommendations.
“It gave me a sense of direction of where to go next,” Gryskewicz said. ”This experience started me off and encouraged me to apply for more internships and research projects, and to stay involved on campus.”
“The big thing for me was that after doing the project, I had a sense of what I wanted to do as a career,” Bush said. “I realized that fieldwork is what I wanted to do. I want to go to graduate school and keep doing research.”
“I came to SUNY Oswego of the mindset I wanted to teach meteorology,” Farrell said. “Doing this experience made me shift to wanting to do research and teach at the same time, like Dr. Steiger does.”
Wider implications, future work
As with most successful research projects, finding answers just creates more questions, so the team is already looking into a large-scale second LEE project that might add different dimensions such as an aircraft and other instrumentation to better understand the makeup of these clouds and examine the relationship between precipitation types and lightning strikes.
“We need to learn more about how it separates the charge, and develop an understanding of what particles might be related to lightning generation,” Steiger said. “We’re still curious about what the precipitation particles are related to lightning, in terms of whether they are more likely to happen with, for example, snow, graupel, hail or other types.”
Those findings, he added, will provide better insight into forecasting and understanding lightning-intense events, and not just in winter.
“If we can figure out what makes up these clouds, this can help us better predict lightning in all seasons,” Steiger said. “Lake-effect storms are closer to the ground and provide an ideal laboratory to study. Often the band just sits there for quite some time, and we can study it for longer periods of time.”
The Oswego research team appeared on the Weather Channel and regional TV broadcasts, and in the Washington Post, among other outlets. The study also produced some amazing documentation of the phenomenon, including video of lighting striking a tower –- the only instance captured anywhere that Steiger knows of –- by Kaitlyn Jesmonth, a 2023 graduate who is now a research assistant pursuing a master’s at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
When students presented research at the AMS annual meeting in New Orleans in January 2025, Farrell said many scientists and researchers wanted to learn more. It also inspired a video segment from Tom Wachs, Fox6 Chief Meteorologist in Milwaukee.
Farrell said one of the biggest areas of interest was the discovery of mesovortices, or horizontal rotations within clouds that produce an isolated charge region where the electrification can get stuck.
“It was great to present about it,” Farrell said. “Many of these researchers had never seen this before and wanted to talk to us about it.”
With all the best tools and technology available, the component of having students, faculty or any human involved in research is an important part of meteorology. Steiger pointed to a recent example from February’s massive winter storm that impacted much of Central New York.
On Tuesday, Feb. 19, when a winter storm pummeled Oswego County and the SUNY Oswego campus throughout the day, “the weather models were 20 miles off, expecting to be further south near Syracuse.”
But as Steiger and his students analyzed the information going in, they realized that the bands were more likely to set up further north –- and were more correct than the most-used models.
“It is pretty well known by us Oswego meteorologists that models have a bias in their solutions so we corrected for this and were more accurate in this past forecast this week than the National Weather Service and TV stations,” Steiger said.
“There is still a lot to learn beyond predictive models. Humans still need to be part of all of the forecasting,” he said, noting this is an important part of preparing future forecasters through Oswego’s meteorology program.
SUNY Oswego's Lake-Effect Electrification research project included this rare video of lake-effect lightning hitting a tower, captured by Kaitlyn Jesmonth, a 2023 graduate who is now a research assistant pursuing a master’s at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.