So, Timothy reports that it's -18 F in Iowa. It's cold here, high today struggled for a while toward 10, but gave up at about 7 degrees around 3 p.m. Now it's 6, feels like -6 with the wind chill, and snow showers may drop a couple of inches on top of the three or four that are already on the ground. Just north of me, about 60 miles or so, however, in Erie, they're still getting snow on top of the 60 inches or so that fell on Christmas Day. I drove through a blinding lake-effect snow between Buffalo and Erie on Deember 8, when about 15-18 inches fell in about 8 hours, and what should have been a little over an hour's drive took almost four. I can't even imagine what 60 inches coming down looked like, and they've had another 10-15 since then, whenever the lake effect machine cranks up. We're at the southern edge of that snow belt, and we can get some pretty heavy snows, but not like that. So much for global warming....
Except that heavy, record lake effect snows are a sign of global warming. The heavy snow in the Great Lakes area ends around early or mid-January, most of the time, when the ice cover gets to its greatest extent. Erie and Ontario freeze over, and so there's no moisture to pick up when the cold Canadian air comes across the lake. As long as the water is warm, though, the snow machine forms. And so, what we are seeing now is record lake-effect snow long after the time that it should be shut off and the lakes frozen over. But Lake Erie hasn't frozen over completely for going on three winters now. So Erie, PA sees a 60 inch Christmas Day snow, a record for 24 hours, and the lake has a long way to go before it freezes over.
https://weather.com/science/environment ... er-weatherAnd if you want to read about the effects of global warming in the places where warm temperatures are the main attraction of the local geography, here's some additional information.
http://tucson.com/news/weather/tucson-s ... e-featured