Lake-Effect Snow to Blast Great Lakes Region

In the wake of Winter Storm Dion, a frigid air mass is setting off the season's heaviest lake-effect snows to date across parts of the Great Lakes region.

(MORE: Current Winter Weather Alerts | Latest Updates)

Wednesday Winds

Cold Wednesday

Cold Thursday

Western Great Lakes

Eastern Great Lakes

As cold winds blow across the relatively warm waters of the Great Lakes, they are picking up moisture. That moisture, in turn, is being wrung out on the lee side of the lakes in the form of locally intense bands of snow.

For Wednesday and Thursday, very cold air – with temperatures near zero 5,000 feet above the ground – will be crossing the open lakes, where water temperatures are in the mid 30s to low 40s. The temperature difference between the air and water has created instability in the atmosphere, allowing moist air near the lake surface to rise, forming clouds and snow squalls.

(INTERACTIVE: Great Lakes Radar)

"Fetch" is the technical term for the distance over which wind crosses open water. When the wind blows down the long axis of one of the Great Lakes, snowfall potential is maximized on the lee side of that lake. In this case, it looks like three areas will have a favorable fetch:

• East of Lake Ontario over the Tug Hill Plateau in upstate New York, north of Syracuse
• East of Lake Erie over southwest New York, mainly south of Buffalo
• East of Lake Huron's Georgian Bay over Ontario province of Canada, as a long fetch of wind crosses Lake Superior and northern Lake Huron

At this time, at least within the U.S., it appears that the heaviest snow totals will be found east of Lake Ontario, where the favorable fetch and the sharp rise in elevation east of the lake will contribute to storm total accumulations of over 3 feet on the Tug Hill Plateau through early Thursday. As of early Thursday morning, 28 inches of snow had piled up east of Lake Ontario in Lacona.

(FORECAST: Syracuse | Watertown | Lowville)

As the inset maps show, significant snowfall will also affect the ski country south of Buffalo as well as the shores of Lake Superior in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

(FORECAST: Jamestown, N.Y. | Marquette, Mich.)

For Lower Michigan, the dominant westerly winds will blow perpendicular to Lake Michigan's axis, leading to multiple bands of less intense lake-effect snow. Still, snow and blowing snow will reduce visibilities especially along and west of U.S. Highway 131, as is typical of this kind of setup.

(FORECAST: Traverse City | Grand Rapids)

Across this entire region, the very cold conditions will lead to snow-covered and icy secondary roads and side streets, and even well-traveled and well-treated roadways may have slick spots. Drive with caution and have a winter weather survival kit with you if you are traveling longer distances between cities.

(MORE: Winter Safety Tips)

In addition to the lake-effect snow across the region, a clipper-type system will bring some light snow across the southern Great Lakes region Wednesday. Expect snowfall on the order of a dusting to a few inches for cities such as Chicago and Detroit with this.

http://www.weather.com/news/weather-winter/lake-effect-snow-blast-great-lakes-region-20131210

Typhoon Haiyan: The latest developments

Tacloban, Philippines (CNN) -- Three days after Super Typhoon Haiyan ripped through the Philippines, the world is just beginning to understand the scope of the devastation left behind. Aid is beginning to arrive in areas hardest-hit by the historic storm, and the grim task of recovering and counting the dead has begun.

Here are the latest developments in the wake of the storm.

The latest

-- The Philippine president declares a "state of national calamity"

-- Pope Francis sends $150,000 to Philippine churches as a "first and immediate expression of concrete feelings of spiritual closeness and fatherly encouragement." The money will be used by officials in the heavily Roman Catholic country to provide aid to storm victims.

-- U.S. Marines arrive at the Tacloban airport, where runways had been cleared sufficiently to allow giant C-130 planes to begin landing with emergency supplies. They will deploy floodlights and radar so the airport can operate after sunset.

-- Some commercial flights have resumed.

Storm weakens, reaches Vietnam

-- At least five people died in Vietnam as Haiyan battered the country, state media reported Monday.

--Typhoon Haiyan weakened to a tropical storm Monday with sustained winds of 68 mph, the Joint Typhoon Warning Center reported. Although the storm is lacking its once powerful punch, the threat of heavy rain, flash floods and landslides remains as Haiyan moves into southern China.

The human toll

-- The Philippine Red Cross estimates that at least 1,200 people were killed by the storm -- known locally as Yolanda -- but that number could change as officials make their way to remote areas made nearly inaccessible by Haiyan.

-- Others put the toll much higher: The International Committee of the Red Cross said it's realistic to estimate that 10,000 people may have died nationally.

-- The Philippine Armed Forces Central Command reported a death toll of 942 Monday night. However, the website for the country's emergency management agency continued to report 255 deaths as of Monday morning.

-- An estimated 9.5 million people have been affected by the typhoon, including roughly 620,000 displaced from their homes, according to the United Nations.

-- As the full impact of the storm is assessed, children are expected to be among the most affected, according to UNICEF, which put the number of children living in the typhoon's path at 1.7 million.

A trail of devastation

-- The destruction across the islands was catastrophic and widespread. For a time, storm clouds covered the entire Philippines, stretching 1,120 miles -- the distance between Florida and Canada -- and tropical storm-force winds covered an area the size of Germany.

-- Houses and buildings were leveled by the storm's powerful winds. Trees were snapped and neighborhoods inundated with floodwater. One CNN reporter, upon seeing the hard-hit city of Tacloban, said: "It is like a tsunami has hit here."

Aid desperately needed

-- Hundreds of people streamed into the city's airport, hoping to take a flight away from the devastated area. "It is fast becoming a large-scale humanitarian airlift," CNN's Paula Hancocks reported. "People simply can't deal with being here."

-- Magina Fernandez, a resident of Tacloban, pleaded Sunday for "international help to come here now. This is really, really like bad, bad, worse than hell. Worse than hell."

-- The United Nations' World Food Programme is setting up logistical pipelines to transport food and other relief items. WFP spokeswoman Bettina Luescher said the U.N. group was gearing up its global resources to send enough food to feed 120,000 people.

-- The U.S. Agency for International Development, known as USAID, announced Saturday it is making available immediately $100,000 to go toward health care, clean water and sanitation in areas hit hard by the devastating storm.

-- "The United States is already providing significant humanitarian assistance, and we stand ready to further assist the government's relief and recovery efforts," U.S. President Barack Obama said Sunday as he expressed support for those affected by the storm.

-- Sandra Bulling, international communications officer for the aid agency CARE, estimates that her organization will be participating in recovery efforts for the next year. "Fishermen have lost their boats. Crops are devastated. This is really the basic income of many people."

Haiyan by the numbers

-- Super Typhoon Haiyan -- one of the strongest tropical cyclones ever observed -- first made landfall before dawn Friday on the Philippines' eastern island of Samar.

-- At the time of landfall, sustained winds were clocked at 195 mph and gusts reached 235 mph -- well above the threshold for a Category 5 hurricane, the strongest level on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale.

-- The storm continued churning across Asia early Monday, making landfall in Vietnam's Quang Ninh Province -- weakened but still powerful. The storm had winds of 75 mph with higher gusts. Five people were reported dead in Vietnam from the storm.

-- So what's the difference between a typhoon and a hurricane? Location. Tropical cyclones with sustained surface winds of 74 mph or more are known as typhoons when they form west of the international date line. East of the line, they're known as hurricanes.

How to help

-- If you're looking for someone missing in the Philippines, or if you have information about someone there, Google.org has launched the Typhoon Yolanda Person Finder.

-- A Google crisis map has also been added to detail evacuation centers and areas designated for relief.

-- Charities and nongovernmental organizations from around the world are responding to the disaster.

-- For more information on how you can help, visit CNN.com/impact.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/11/world/asia/typhoon-haiyan-developments/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

Galapagos study to test if climate change worsens El Nino

Quito (AFP) - Think Galapagos and you think nature in its most pristine expression. But the destructive weather phenomenon called El Nino turns coral reefs there a sickly white and sea iguanas scrawny.

And now, in an unprecedented experiment, scientists using unmanned submarines in the waters off the Ecuadoran archipelago are probing whether global warming is related to El Nino.

There is not yet conclusive evidence of a link. But experts are very serious about the possibility that climate change is making El Nino -- unusually warm water in the Pacific off the west coast of South America -- more frequent and more intense.

For hundreds of years, the weather system at the Galapagos did not have to worry about global warming, said Eduardo Espinoza, head of maritime research at the Galapagos National Park.

But climate change associated with human activity could turn El Nino into a death sentence for several marine species that are unique to the archipelago.

With future studies, it will become clear if global warming is making El Nino nastier and more frequent, said Espinoza.

Located 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) off the coast, the Galapagos Islands -- the natural laboratory that inspired Darwin's theory of evolution -- every now and then suffer with the arrival of El Nino.

Besides warmer water, the phenomenon is also characterized by heavy rains and weaker winds.

Scientists from Ecuador's Navy Oceanographic Institute (INOCAR), working with US organizations like the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and The Scripps Research Institute, launched robot subs late last month to learn more about the weather quirk.

For two years, six subs will submerge in the Galapagos sea to collect data on what is known as the Cromwell Current, an underwater stream that helps nurture the food supply in the waters and is involved in El Nino, said INOCAR's Captain Wellington Renteria.

"El Nino has ravaged the Galapagos. In particular, the rise in temperature has caused almost all the coral reefs to disappear," he said.

Organizations like the International Programme on the State of the Ocean and the International Union for Conservation of Nature warned in October that the world's oceans are getting hit with a three-pronged punch: global warming, deoxygenation and acidification.

Hunger, death at the ocean's depths

After Australia, the Galapagos Islands -- declared part of the world's nature heritage -- has the planet's largest marine reserve on the planet at 133,000 square kilometers (51,000 square miles), the park says.

Between 1982 and 1998, El Nino made a mess of the archipelago and left a trail of death: colorful coral colonies turned white, and a dramatic drop in the populations of endangered penguins, cormorants, sea lions and marine iguanas.

Some species died of hunger because the algae they feed on disappeared temporarily.

El Nino reduces the sea's productivity, and each group of creatures takes years to recover. So the more El Ninos there are, the less time the species have to restore themselves.

"With the marine iguanas, we found something very interesting because with the El Nino phenomenon, they shrink. They lose weight. In height, they are as many as five centimeters (two inches) shorter," said Judith Denkinger from the Institute of Ocean Sciences at the University of San Francisco in Quito.

After each chapter of El Nino, the frequency of which can vary between two and eight years, species take from 15 to 30 years to recover -- in other words, to re-establish a balance between births and deaths.

But the probability that a new phenomenon will hit the islands hard during that rehab stretch "is very large, which basically means the population is headed toward extinction," said Denkinger, a Galapagos marine life expert.

The archipelago is at a spot where several currents and sub-currents converge. This explains the richness of marine life. One of these is the undersea Cromwell Current, which drags in nutrients that form a huge food chain.

While that subcurrent is being studied, along with its ties to El Nino, marine life at the Galapagos is deteriorating more quickly than life on the islands themselves despite conservation efforts.

"The marine part is not in good shape at all," said Denkinger.

"We are worried about the sea lions. We are seeing intense hunting by sharks inside and outside the waters of the Galapagos. And the human population is rising so much that in coastal areas the changes are noticeable. You can see that there are not so many fish anymore."

http://news.yahoo.com/galapagos-study-test-climate-change-worsens-el-nino-163917286.html

Tropical Storm Sonia: Mexico Socked By Heavy Rains Before Storm Dissipated

MEXICO CITY -- Former Tropical Storm Sonia dissipated over the Mexican Pacific coast state of Sinaloa, but not before causing some minor flooding in cities such as Mazatlan and Culiacan, forcing the evacuation of around 1,000 people, authorities said Monday.

The evacuations were largely preventative and people are expected to start returning to their homes, said Sinaloa state civil defense official Gabriel Olivera.

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(MORE: Track Sonia)

There were no confirmed reports of injuries, but one fisherman was reported as missing at sea, Olivera said.

The U.S. National Hurricane Center said Monday that Sonia had been downgraded to a tropical depression and later dissipated after hitting land early Monday, but it said moisture from the storm system will continue on into Texas.

The government of Sinaloa state said classes were canceled for Monday in five municipalities affected by the storm.

"While the 2013 Atlantic hurricane season has given the U.S. a breather, Mexico has seen eight landfalling storms this year, with Sonia being the latest," said weather.com senior meteorologist Jon Erdman.

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Hurricane Wilma Oct. 15-25, 2005

After causing severe damage to the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, Wilma made landfall just south of Naples, Florida, as a Category 3 hurricane, producing widespread wind damage in South Florida. Wilma was the strongest Atlantic hurricane on record, by central pressure, bottoming out at 882 millibars in the western Caribbean Sea. (Image: NOAA)

http://www.weather.com/news/weather-hurricanes/tropical-depression-sonia-mexico-braces-heavy-rains-20131104