It’s late Friday evening, 11/29/24, and snow is approaching across the Great Lakes region. Hot off the presses of AccuWeather.com at 10:48 p.m. Central is this:

“Dangerous, life-threatening conditions will develop in the snow belts downwind of the Great Lakes early next week as the lake effect increases with whiteouts, rapid accumulation and falling temperatures.”

This is a well-known forecast for the Great Lakes region. Snowfall is legendary in Buffalo, NY, on the eastern edge of Lake Erie. As global warming increases, can Buffalo residents hope that one day the skies won’t be so cold and their snowstorms won’t be so devastating?

Not so, according to the results of a recent multi-institutional study of future climate conditions and lake-effect snowstorms. It was led by climate scientist Miraj Kayastha of Michigan Technological University.

A lake effect snowstorm (LES) occurs when cold, dry air flows over a warm lake. Dry air has an enormous capacity to absorb water. When the temperature difference between cold air and warm water causes lake water to evaporate, the exchange of moisture between the lake surface and the clouds that form destabilizes the atmosphere. Uneven, higher terrain around the lake can also release water particles, increasing moisture exchange and atmospheric instability. Ultimately, newly formed clouds hurl huge amounts of snow into a stormy sky.

In Kayastha’s study of the future of maritime storms, he and his colleagues took a so-called “storyline” approach, using two modeling systems to examine and quantify the forces that caused a single LES storm in November 2022. This storm dropped 30 inches (77 centimeters) of snow on Erie County, New York. (That’s Buffalo County.) With this information and using their modeling tools, the scientists predicted how strong these November 2022 forces could be in the Great Lakes region in the mid- and late 21st century^st Century, when the climate is expected to get warmer (and then even warmer). In the 2022 storm, snowfall accounted for 89% of total precipitation. The rest was rain. Kayastha and his team predicted that in the expected mid-century climate, snowfall from LES storms will account for about 78% of precipitation. By the end of the century, nearly half (54%) of precipitation from LES storms will be rain.

Unfortunately, a relative increase in rainfall is not necessarily good news. Rain on top of the snowpack poses a significant risk of flooding. Additionally, over the course of the century, as air and water warm and ice that inhibits evaporation melts, there may be more precipitation overall. Kayastha’s team predicted that by the end of the 21st^st Century, total rainfall will increase by up to 14% during storms in the Southwest Coast.

AccuWeather.com’s forecast for the Great Lakes area this week is worrisome. If history is any indication of the future, the storm predicted may be more likely to be the same terrible, same old storm. Nearly two years ago (December 2022), dozens of people died in an LES storm in Eerie County. Atmospheric instability caused by evaporation and precipitation contributed to winds of 70 miles per hour. Wind chills fell to -30°F, contributing to the disaster.

As this article went live, Kayastha was unavailable for comment and the storm was approaching. The Great Lakes are the largest unfrozen surface freshwater system in the world. Lake effect storms do not occur every year, but they do occur frequently. Climate change is unlikely to bring any relief.