How Could Future Climate Reshape a Devastating Lake-Effect Snow Storm?
Snow reaches roof heights after a lake-effect storm in Buffalo. In late fall and early winter, the Great Lakes moisten cold dry air, triggering lake-effect snow storms. Buffalo, located downwind of Lake Erie, often faces these devastating storms.
Image by New York National Guard, Flickr: https://flickr.com/photos/nyng/15643529970/in/album-72157648959077470/
Lake-effect snow (LES) storms manifest when cold air moves over warm lakes. Our current understanding of their future evolution is, however, limited due to rudimentary representations of the Great Lakes in modeling systems. Using a state-of-the-art fully lake-land-atmosphere modeling system, researchers weaved together a coherent story for the November 2022 Buffalo LES storm and outlined how various future climate processes and interactions might lead to changes in the storm. Results revealed increased future storm precipitation due to higher lake evaporation and highlighted the importance of an accurate representation of lake warming and lake-atmosphere interactions to accurately simulate future storms.
By simulating the November 2022 Buffalo LES storm under the warmer future climate, researchers produced a first-of-its-kind event-oriented future storyline of an LES storm and revealed an increase in future storm precipitation amount with an increase in rainfall at the expense of snowfall. Moreover, through experiments with isolated warming of the atmosphere and the Great Lakes to the future levels, researchers provided a mechanistic understanding of the influence of warmer atmosphere and lake to LES storms. Neglecting the lake-atmosphere interaction, as in experiments focusing only on atmospheric warming, was found to significantly misrepresent future LES storms.
LES storms are known to decimate regions downwind of the Great Lakes with several meters of snow and millions of dollars in damages. In this study, researchers used a two-way coupled three-dimensional lake-land-atmosphere modeling system, along with the Pseudo-Global Warming technique that incorporates large-scale climate changes into simulations, to investigate how devastating LES storms could unfold in the future. A physically consistent future storyline for the LES storm that hit Buffalo, New York in November 2022 was developed and results revealed that the storm could produce a higher precipitation amount by up to 14% in the future due to increased lake evaporation. This increase was accompanied by a transition in the precipitation form from predominantly snowfall to nearly equal parts snowfall and rainfall. Additionally, this shift from towards rainfall was found to nearly double the area experiencing another concurrent winter hazard, Rain-on-Snow. This study provided a plausible future storyline for the Buffalo LES storm, focusing on understanding the intricate lake-atmosphere interaction that shapes the future dynamics of LES storms. The study also emphasized the importance of accurately capturing the changing lake conditions and lake-atmosphere dynamics through a two-way coupled three-dimensional lake model during LES storms under future warming.