Feb. 19--No you weren't imagining things, Chicago's lakefront looked as though it was steaming like a hot tub Thursday morning.
The reason?
Well, compared to the bitterly cold air blowing over it, Lake Michigan is relatively warm, said David Beachler, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service. The air temperature dipped below zero Thursday, while the lake itself was in the low 30s, he said.
"So what's happening is sort of like when you open a refrigerator or a freezer," he said. "You can see it, a fog almost kind of a thing. ... You're getting a lot of moisture to be pulled out of the lake really quickly."
But don't mistake it for actual fog, which lingers over the lake and shoreline rather than dissipating into the air like this winter's steam, according to Beachler. Lake fog tends to happen in springtime, when the lake is colder than the warm air around it.
The winter phenomenon "is more of a water vapor that's getting sucked up out of the lake," Beachler said.
Don't get too attached to the hot-tub effect: The cold will ease a little over the weekend, Beachler said.
"We're actually probably going to get to the 20s tomorrow, and we might actually touch 30 degrees on saturday," Beachler said. "So it's going to feel like a heat wave."
Chicago saw a record low on Thursday: Around daybreak, the temperature at O'Hare International Airport dropped to 8 below, beating the previous record of 7 below for this date set in 1936.
Contributing: Chicago Tribune
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