• Late-season winter storm threatens huge swath of US

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    By John Newland, Staff Writer, NBC News

    March may go out like a lamb, but it promises to be a lion for the next few days for a huge strip of the country.

    A late-season winter storm is predicted to bring snow, ice and even blizzard conditions from the Northern Plains to the New England coast and as far south as the nation's capital.

    Wednesday is the first day of spring, but try telling that to people in the affected areas. 

    The National Weather Service issued blizzard warnings for large parts of the Dakotas and Minnesota as winds gusted at 50 mph and snow started piling up late Sunday and early Monday.

    Traffic could be snarled in urban centers, especially the Twin Cities, and things might not be much better in Chicago, where just a bit of snow is forecast but freezing rain threatens to bedevil Monday morning commuters.

    The wintry mess will spread across the northern Great Lakes region and into the Northeast later Monday and into Tuesday, according to Weather.com.

    Full coverage from Weather.com

    Most of Wisconsin is under a winter weather advisory, while lake-effect snows are expected in western Michigan. Across the southern Great Lakes, including Cleveland and much of northern Ohio, as well as parts of western Pennsylvania, snow is expected to be followed by freezing rain throughout much of Monday, potentially causing traffic tie-ups throughout the region, according to NBCChicago.com said.

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    Much of the same is possible as far south as Washington, D.C. Its far western, northern and southern suburbs in Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia were under winter storm warnings and advisories through Monday evening.


    Much of the heavily populated Northeast Corridor looks to escape the worst of the snow, but freezing rain and some snow could complicate travel in New York, NBCNewYork.com warned.

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    Boston lies just to the east of the weather service winter storm warning area, but much of New England doesn't look likely to be spared the storm.

    Most of northern New England was under winter storm warning into Tuesday -- and through Wednesday for much of Maine -- with forecasters predicting up to 14 inches of snow and winds gusting at 25 to 30 mph from Western New York to the Maine coast.

    This story was originally published on Mon Mar 18, 2013 5:32 AM EDT

  • 2 Great Lakes hit lowest water level on record

    John Flesher / AP file

    In this Nov. 16, 2012 photo, a sand bar is exposed on Portage Lake in Onekama, Mich., due to low water levels. The waterway is connected by a channel to nearby Lake Michigan where water levels have reached record lows.

    By John Flesher, The Associated Press

    Two of the Great Lakes have hit their lowest water levels ever recorded, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said Tuesday, capping more than a decade of below-normal rain and snowfall and higher temperatures that boost evaporation.

    Measurements taken last month show Lake Huron and Lake Michigan have reached their lowest ebb since record keeping began in 1918, and the lakes could set additional records over the next few months, the corps said. The lakes were 29 inches below their long-term average and had declined 17 inches since January 2012.

    The other Great Lakes — Superior, Erie and Ontario — were also well below average.

    "We're in an extreme situation," said Keith Kompoltowicz, watershed hydrology chief for the corps district office in Detroit.

    The low water has caused heavy economic losses by forcing cargo ships to carry lighter loads, leaving boat docks high and dry, and damaging fish-spawning areas. And vegetation has sprung up in newly exposed shoreline bottomlands, a turnoff for hotel customers who prefer sandy beaches.

    The corps' report came as shippers pleaded with Congress for more money to dredge ever-shallower harbors and channels. Shippers are taxed to support a harbor maintenance fund, but only about half of the revenue is spent on dredging. The remainder is diverted to the treasury for other purposes. Legislation to change that policy is pending before Congress.

    "Plunging water levels are beyond anyone's control, but the dredging crisis is man-made," said James Weakley, president of the Cleveland-based Lake Carriers' Association.


    Kompoltowicz said the Army corps might reconsider a long-debated proposal to place structures in a river to reduce the flow of water away from Lakes Huron and Lake Michigan, which are connected.

    Scientists say lake levels are cyclical and controlled mostly by nature. They began a steep decline in the late 1990s and have usually lagged well below their historical averages since then.

    But studies have shown that Huron and Michigan fell by 10 to 16 inches because of dredging over the years to deepen the navigational channel in the St. Clair River, most recently in the 1960s. Dredging of the river, which is on the south end of Lake Huron, accelerated the flow of water southward from the two lakes toward Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, and eventually into the Atlantic Ocean.

    Groups representing shoreline property owners, primarily in Lake Huron's Georgian Bay, have demanded action to slow the Lake Huron and Michigan outflow to make up for losses that resulted from dredging, which they contend are even greater than officials have acknowledged.

    Although the Army corps produced a list of water-slowing options in 1972, including miniature dams and sills that resemble speed bumps along the river bottom, nothing was done because the lakes were in a period of above-average levels that lasted nearly three decades, Kompoltowicz said.

    The corps has congressional authorization to take action but would need money for an updated study as a first step, he said. The Detroit office is considering a funding request, but it would have to compete with other projects nationwide and couldn't get into the budget before 2015.

    "It's no guarantee that we're going to get it, especially in this budget climate," Kompoltowicz said. "But there are serious impacts to navigation and shoreline property owners from this extreme event. It's time to revisit this."

    Scientists and engineers convened by the International Joint Commission, a U.S.-Canadian agency that deals with shared waterways, issued reports in 2009 and last year that opposed trying to regulate the Great Lakes by placing structures at choke points such as the St. Clair River. The commission has conducted public hearings and will issue a statement in about a month, spokesman John Nevin said.

    Roger Gauthier, a retired staff hydrologist with the Army corps, said a series of "speed bumps" could be put in the river at a reasonable cost within a few years. Without such measures, he warned, "it would take years of consistent rain" to return Lake Michigan and Lake Huron to normal.

    © 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

  • Weekend waterspouts across Great Lakes are part of record year

    ICWR.ca observer

    This waterspout formed over Lake Erie on Sunday. The photo was taken looking east towards Cleveland, Ohio, from Lorain, Ohio.

    By Miguel Llanos, NBC News

    The Cleveland Browns football team hosted a special pregame show on Sunday: a waterspout seen from the lakeside stadium before sputtering out harmlessly. It was one of 13 waterspouts reported over Lake Erie on Sunday and part of what's already a record year for sightings on the Great Lakes.


    "2012 has seen so far a total of 154 waterspouts," Wade Szilagyi, a meteorologist with Canada's weather service and director of the International Centre for Waterspout Research, told NBC News.

    "This shatters the old record of 94 waterspouts reported in 2003," he said, noting that the season runs into fall so the number will go higher.

    Great Lakes waterspout records go back to 1994 and this summer also saw a new single-day record: 30 waterspouts reported on Sept. 9.

    Szilagyi suspects two factors are at work: "a hot summer resulting in very warm water," which helps create the waterspouts, and increased use of social media for reporting them.

    "Technology is improving through Twitter, Facebook, cell phone pics, etc.," he noted. "In the past we had a limited number of sources such as Coast Guard, pilot reports, ship reports, weather observations."

    "In the future, as our climate gets warmer, thus heating the lakes, and as social media use increases even more, I expect increasing numbers of reported waterspouts," he added. "However, just like the stock market, there will be dips because some summers will be cool, but this will be less and less frequent with time."

    Sunday's activity was part of a weekend-long outbreak that started Friday on Lake Superior. Four waterspouts were sighted that day, followed by eight on Saturday as cold air from Canada moved down and across the warmer lakes.

    Szilagyi was actually able to predict the outbreak using an index he fully implemented this year after working on it for 18 years.

    "We can now predict conditions that are favorable for waterspout development several days in advance," he said.

    The weekend activity also caught the attention of locals who tweeted dozens of images, as well as other weather experts.

    Weather.com, for one, posted images and a video.

    NBC News meteorologist Bill Karins retweeted a photo of the spout near Cleveland Browns Stadium.

    icwa.org

    This Great Lakes map shows the forecast for waterspouts on Monday. Red is the highest danger in the system devised by Wade Szilagyi.

    "This one was weak and wouldn't have done much damage had it moved on shore," he noted. But had it done so, he added, it would have been categorized as a weak tornado. 

    "Lots of people don't realize waterspouts happen frequently during warm months over the Great Lakes -- most people think Florida and the Keys are where they are the most frequent," he added.

    As for those Cleveland fans who saw the spout, their team lost on Sunday but Mother Nature did provide a second treat, this time post-game: a double rainbow, Cleveland's newsnet5.com reported.

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  • Great Lakes ice coverage falls 71 percent over 40 years, researcher says

     

    NASA file

    Snow cover lingered in the Great Lakes region on Feb. 16, 2008, as shown by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite.

    By msnbc.com staff

    Great Lakes ice coverage declined an average of 71 percent over the past 40 years, according to a report from the American Meteorological Society.

    The amount of decline varies year to year and lake to lake, according to the report's lead researcher, Jia Wang, an ice research climatologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory in Ann Arbor, Mich.

    Wang’s report said that based on Coast Guard scanning, satellite photos and other research from 1973 to 2010, ice coverage dropped most on Lake Ontario, 88 percent; the second-largest loss was on Lake Superior, at 79 percent.


    The smallest decline, 37 percent, was on Lake St. Clair, a lake between Lakes Erie and Huron that was also included in the study.

    The study doesn’t include the current winter, but satellite photos show that only about 5 percent of Great Lakes surface froze over this winter, the Detroit Free Press said. That’s down from years such as 1979, when there was as much as 94 percent ice coverage. On average, about 40 percent of the surfaces freeze over, the newspaper said.

    Wang told WBEZ-FM in Chicago that diminished ice coverage speeds wintertime evaporation, reducing the lakes’ water levels, which can spur increased and early algae blooms, damage water quality, and accelerate erosion as more shoreline is exposed to waves.

    Wang told the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper that natural climatic variables such as El Nino, La Nina play as much a role in the ice decline as a warming global climate.

    "We are seeing the impact of global warming here in the Great Lakes -- but the natural variability is at least as large a factor," Wang said.

    Wang said global climate change and regional climate patterns are competing over the Great Lakes.

    The Great Lakes, scientists say, contain about 20 percent of the world's fresh water supply and cover 94,000 square miles in two countries.

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  • Lake-effect snow, wind to ease after slamming Northeast

    Mark Duncan / AP

    Treasa Thomas clears snow from her car on a downtown Cleveland, Ohio street on Tuesday. More snow is expected.

    By Reuters

    Frigid air blasting over the Great Lakes blew in the season's first major lake effect snowstorm on Monday, blocking visibility and causing massive pileups on icy roads from Michigan to Kentucky.

    As much as 2 feet of snow was expected to fall on upstate New York by Tuesday as the storm moves eastward from Michigan, where over 1 foot of snow fell by Monday afternoon, said meteorologist Bernie Rayno on Accuweather.com.

    "You can see all of the snow showing up from the upper Peninsula of Michigan through western New York state, all the way through western Virginia and Kentucky," Rayno said.

    "It's this west-northwest flow over the lakes that's causing this lake effect," he said.

    Blustery winds were forecast to continue over the Great Lakes, causing heavy snow showers downwind of the lakes early in the day but becoming more scattered in the afternoon.

    On Monday, strong gusting winds and close to zero visibility were blamed for highway crashes such as a 30-car pileup south of Cincinnati that closed parts of Interstate 75, police said.

    Story: Season's first snow in central U.S. causes crashes

    Near Indianapolis, Indiana State Police were working to clear 80 crashes in just over four hours that were caused by slick road conditions which shut sections of Interstates 70, 465 and 65.

    "People are sliding into barrier walls and on slick ramps," said Sergeant Rich Myers of Indiana State Police. 

    Winter weather advisories, winter storm warnings, and lake-effect snow watches and warnings were to remain in effect for areas downwind of Lakes Erie and Ontario through Tuesday evening.

    In addition to snow, strong northwest winds of 15 to 25 mph were forecast and were expected to affect traffic with periods of blowing and drifting snow and reduced visibilities.

    While a snow storm blankets Cleveland, a bank thermometer displays the outside temperature as being about 100 degrees higher. Msnbc.com's Dara Brown reports.

     

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