The Buffalo News --
Winter weather weirdness may be just beginning
Meteorologists and geographers say that lake-effect snows have increased as temperatures have warmed in recent decades. That means more bizarre early-season storms, though not necessarily as bad as last week’s, are likely in the future as the warming trend continues.
“The general notion is that, as the climate warms and the lakes hold their warmth longer into the fall, you’re going to see a lot more lake-effect snow until it’s too warm to have much snow,” said Mark Monmonier, distinguished professor of geography at Syracuse University and the author of the 2012 book “Lake Effect: Tales of Large Lakes, Arctic Winds, and Recurrent Snows.”
***
Adding it all up, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration – which watched it all happening on its weather satellites – said on its website: “While the Bering Sea Superstorm did not directly cause the snow event in New York, it did set the stage for it by nudging the jet stream into an unusual shape that sent a pulse of cool Arctic air south over the central United States.”
The trouble is, the jet stream’s “unusual shape” isn’t all that unusual anymore – and that’s just one reason why big early-season lake-effect snows may become our new normal.
“We’ve seen an unusual number of extreme jet-stream patterns like this in the past fifteen years, which happens to coincide with the period of time we’ve been observing record loss of summertime Arctic sea ice and record retreat of springtime snow cover in the Arctic,” Masters, the weather blogger, wrote last week. “Could it be that these changes in the Arctic are causing the wacky jet-stream behavior of recent years? That’s the theory being advanced by a number of prominent climate scientists.”
http://www.buffalonews.com/city-regi...nning-20141122