Why winter storms are becoming bigger and badder around the Great Lakes — and what it means for those at risk | 24CA News
CBC’s Great Lakes Climate Change Project is a joint initiative between CBC’s Ontario stations to discover local weather change from a provincial lens. Darius Mahdavi, a scientist with a level in conservation biology and immunology and a minor in environmental biology from the University of Toronto, explains how points associated to local weather change have an effect on folks throughout the province, and explores options, particularly in smaller cities and communities.
This Christmas, as a winter storm blanketed southern Ontario, Gabe Oni hunkered down on the Hamilton warming centre The Hub together with dozens of different weak and unhoused individuals who had been left with nowhere to remain.
“It was insane,” Oni mentioned. “The snow came out of nowhere and so nobody was really, like, prepared for it. Usually everyone prepares during the year or whatever, prepares whatever they have to prepare. But nobody was ready. There were like no jackets … It was bad.”
Jen Bonner, The Hub’s government director, mentioned the wind and blowing snow knocked over tents and compelled folks to hunt shelter. For anybody with out a dwelling, a winter storm could be lethal, she mentioned.
“A tent can collapse very easily with a significant amount of snow. A tent can collapse when winds are up really high. People are sleeping in there, and so if they are in a very deep sleep, people could get buried alive in their own possessions.”
Service suppliers throughout Ontario struggled as the snowstorm compelled them to adapt.
And sadly, as a consequence of local weather change, all these situations are more likely to grow to be extra frequent across the Great Lakes over the following a number of many years.
Another Ontario area hit onerous in the course of the latest vacation storms was Chatham-Kent, simply northeast of Windsor. Heavy snowfall and excessive winds buried automobiles and generated whiteout circumstances, stopping workers, volunteers and repair customers from reaching Chatham’s Hope Haven, a warming centre that stays open in a single day in excessive chilly.
“We were anticipating cold temperatures, but the wind and the accumulation of snow that happens over the course of a winter or over the course of a week … we got that over the course of a few hours,” mentioned Loree Bailey, director of Hope Haven.
“When people are living in encampments, they have a lot of their belongings with them, all of their worldly and necessary possessions on them. And they are now trudging through that weather.”
Lake impact and winter storms
The storm that hit Ontario in December was pushed by a variety of climate occasions, however a significant contributor to the heavy snowfall was what’s often known as the “lake effect.”
The lake impact is a comparatively uncommon phenomenon that may solely happen in a number of locations around the globe with giant sufficient our bodies of water, together with the Great Lakes.
The Great Lakes, which maintain over 20 per cent of the world’s freshwater, are notably liable to lake impact storms — as those that dwell in communities on the shoreline will inform you.
A lake impact snowstorm happens solely beneath specific circumstances, when chilly air passes over a comparatively heat physique of water. The air picks up moisture and warmth from the lake, which causes the newly warmed air to rise. High within the environment, the moisture then cools and condenses, and begins to fall as snow.
Importantly, the temperature distinction have to be not less than 13 C — and there must be open water for the system to select up moisture.
Since Canada’s prevailing winds come from the west or northwest, and chilly air usually comes down from the Arctic, communities like Thunder Bay, Hamilton or Toronto, located to the north or west of a Great Lake, are sometimes spared the worst of lake impact storms.
Communities instantly east of a Great Lake are sometimes hit a lot more durable.
While lake impact snowfalls can journey comparatively far over land — for example, storms generated over Lake Huron may even attain Toronto — the storms grow to be much less extreme the farther they journey. Instead, locations like Hamilton and Toronto are most liable to heavy snowfalls when winds come from the southeast and cross over Lake Ontario.
Last month’s storm was generated by a chilly wind from the southwest.The window for lake impact storms is usually at first of the winter season, when the Great Lakes are warmest and earlier than they freeze over.
But that window could also be rising, as modelling suggests these circumstances could grow to be extra frequent because the local weather adjustments.
‘Once-in-a-generation’ storms extra possible
As the planet warms, most of Canada will see lowered snowfall as a consequence of hotter temperatures.
But communities alongside the Great Lakes may very well be an exception, mentioned Adam Burnett, a professor at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., who has studied the lake impact.
“As the climate warms, we’re going to have ever warmer lake temperatures and less ice cover. That’s going to create an opportunity for more evaporation of water into the overlying air as cold air moves across. That is an ideal setup for Lake effect snow.”
Basically, Burnett mentioned, it is a recipe for greater, extra intense lake impact snowfalls.
Coupled with the unpredictable climate related to local weather change, we might see extra harmful storms with out a lot advance warning.
Although broad-scale modelling does not all the time seize the lake impact, native fashions can.
David Wright, a Michigan-based scientist with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, helped construct one such mannequin.
Using information from a lake impact snowstorm in 2009, Wright and his colleagues modelled what the storm would have regarded like beneath completely different lake circumstances.
WATCH | See the chaos brought on by the vacation storms:
Residents throughout southern Ontario and Quebec are coping with a messy winter storm that is introduced freeway chaos and energy outages simply forward of the vacations.
Among varied different fascinating conclusions, they discovered that if the lake was simply 3 levels C hotter and ice free, the areas the storm hit hardest might have been over thrice bigger.
Of course, this assumes every thing else is held fixed, which would not be the case because the planet warms.
Both Wright and Burnett made it clear that if temperatures proceed to climb, after a number of many years, we could not see the chilly air essential to generate snow — leaving us with intense lake impact rainstorms as an alternative.
Shelter from the storms
Still, a number of many years is a very long time.
Oni, at The Hub in Hamilton, mentioned the potential of seeing extra extreme winter storms worries him, endangering folks experiencing homelessness.
“It would mean that a lot of people would either freeze or people would start doing things that nobody wants to do but has to do,” he mentioned. “Nobody’s trying to stay outside in the snow in the winter.”
He mentioned locations like The Hub are important as folks scramble to search out someplace heat to attend out the following massive storm.
“Honestly, places like The Hub, they’re like a saving grace in my eyes.”
