Ashtabula, Ohio — Jim Timonere has been watching and waiting for Lake Erie to freeze over, just to catch a break.

It’s been a brutal winter for communities along the southeastern and eastern shores of Lake Erie that spans Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York.

Last Thanksgiving Day weekend, the region was paralyzed by a “historic” storm that saw almost six feet of snow upend life across hundreds of miles.

“When I woke up at 3 a.m. to check the snowfall I thought: ‘no big deal,’” he recalls. 

“Two hours later, I looked outside, and it was: ‘Oh, my god.’ We got feet of snow in a matter of hours.”

Roofs of more than a dozen structures in Ashtabula collapsed, including the local high school’s, forcing hundreds of students to take online classes for a month. 

“We’re used to the eight inches of snow. We can handle that,” says Timonere, then and now the city manager for a town of nearly 18,000 people. 

“(But) when you start talking feet, and two to three inches in an hour, nobody can keep up with that.”

By many measures, Lake Erie is the least spectacular of the five Great Lakes— it’s the shallowest, smallest by volume, and farthest south. 

But it’s creating dangerous snow conditions for millions of people from Cleveland, Ohio to Buffalo, New York and beyond.

While snowfall across much of America’s upper Midwest has been below average this winter, the opposite is playing out in regions downwind of the Great Lakes.

Twice so far this winter, residents along Lake Erie’s southeastern and eastern shorelines have experienced record snow storms, resulting in the national guard being mobilized and snow emergencies declared. 

Paradoxically, some evidence suggests our warming planet could lead to more major snow events for communities downwind of the Great Lakes. 

When cold air moving south from the Arctic and Canada passes over lakes that have been heated throughout the summer and fall, it creates conditions for fast water evaporation into the atmosphere that then can lead to massive, fast-falling snow dumps.

(Canada's beloved outdoor ice rinks are melting away. Read more.)

Because it’s shallow—just 210 feet at its deepest point—water temperatures in Lake Erie can increase rapidly during the summer and fall months. Since record keeping began in 1927, the Lake’s water temperatures have been rising. Throughout the 1950s, a thermometer submerged at Buffalo, New York, recorded temperatures at or below 69˚F for 28 days in the month of August. The past decade saw that happen on just two days, when the average temperature rose to 74˚F. 

Those warming waters have resulted in record low ice cover in recent winters; on the first day of 2025, Lake Erie was still ice-free, though a subsequent cool down saw much of the Lake freeze over later this winter. These warm conditions create the perfect ingredients for heavy snowfall.

“On some level, compared to the past, (the lake-effect snow has been) extraordinary, this winter in particular. It’s because of how warm the lakes have been,” says Richard ‘Ricky’ Rood, professor emeritus at the University of Michigan who runs Open Climate, a website that collects and shares climate science lesson plans. 

“What we’re seeing this year is the fact that the Lakes are staying warm, relatively ice-free far later into the winter season, and you still have cold air outbreaks,” says Rood.

A study published in the Journal of Climate in 2003 found “a statistically significant increasing trend in snowfall for the lake-effect sites” throughout the 20th century across all Great Lakes. And another study looking at Buffalo, New York and published in the journal Earth’s Future last June found that the conditions that produce lake-effect snow could produce 14 percent more precipitation as the planet warms, though some of that may fall as rain. 

Modeling by the Great Lakes Integrated Sciences and Assessments (GLISA) program suggests that air temperatures in the region could rise by up to 11˚F by 2100, a change that would create warmer lake water as years of warmer weather unfold. 

Given the complex relationship between Arctic air flows and changing climate patterns, experts say they can’t predict with certainty what future snowfall around the Great Lakes will look like, though the ingredients for severe snow storms—warming lake surface water and shots of extremely cold Arctic air—are likely to continue.

“The frequency of air crossing the Great Lakes that is cold enough to produce lake-effect snow is likely decreasing on average,” says David Kristovich of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s department of climate, meteorology, and atmospheric sciences.

“However, it is difficult to envision a situation where occasional, extreme, relatively cold air outbreaks producing intense short-term lake-effect rains or snows stop occurring,” he adds.

It’s not only Great Lakes residents who could face dangerous lake-effect snow in the years ahead. Warmer water has led to more sea- and lake-effect snow storms abroad, with trends documented in Istanbul and in cities downwind of the Sea of Japan. 

In January, lake-effect snow was reported along the United States Gulf Coast.

Overall, winters are getting warmer, but cold air outbreaks will still occur, resulting in fewer, but more severe, storms. In January, for example, the Erie region of Pennsylvania recorded an average amount of snowfall for the month, but half of that fell in just three days.

 “Since the climate is actively warming, what we’re doing now is starting to sample this warming climate,” says Rood. “Do not treat these as a one-off event.”

(From our September 2020 issue: The Great Lakes depend on ice. What happens when they barely freeze?)

JoAnn Vranek, a retired English teacher who has lived in Ashtabula for decades, says she wasn’t able to get out of her house during the Thanksgiving weekend storm, and had to hire a snow removal contractor to clear her driveway. 

“I got a good deal (but) others on my street had to pay hundreds of dollars to hire people,” she says.

“The house next to me, her eaves and flashing came down. She’s going to have to get that fixed. I don’t ever remember that happening before.”

The local high school building where Vranek once worked and which was built less than 20 years ago at a cost of nearly $40 million, remains closed due to the snow-induced roof collapse. Authorities say it may be a year before all students are back on campus.

The Thanksgiving storm also put major strain on critical services in Ashtabula. 

Timonere says the city’s emergency services struggled to reach people, some of whom faced high carbon monoxide readings in their homes after furnace vents were blocked by snow. One local township had to deploy a water tanker truck to put out a fire because fire hydrants were buried under the snow and fire crews couldn’t find them. 

“For small communities like us, we don’t have an abundance of funds to deal with this,” he says. 

“I don’t have 20 guys I can put on the roads when we get snow like this, like the big cities might have.”

He recommends residents in the path of lake-effect snowstorms have contractors inspect their roofs.

Yue Li, a professor of engineering at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, says that adapting to heavier snow storms will require serious upgrades. 

“Cities will need to design neighborhoods with better snow drainage systems, integrating snow storage areas (and) reviewing building standards, especially for roofs, to ensure they can withstand heavy snow loads,” he says.

“Expanding access to snow removal equipment, storage sites, and backup supplies like salt and sand is vital for maintaining mobility and safety.”

Ashtabula is embarking on a $100 million plan to upgrade its water treatment and wastewater infrastructure, and community leaders now find themselves taking flooding from rain and heavy snow events into account. 

“Hopefully this was an anomaly, but like we’ve said,” says Timonere, “the weather is changing and there’s no denying it anymore.”