Global warming? Not in these parts

With May a little more than a week away, the Great Lakes are still a third ice-covered at a time of year when they were often entirely ice-free or very nearly so.

This is the largest ice cover so late in the season observed in the satellite era — since the 1970s, basically.

The frozen Great Lakes and persistent cold air in that region, the Northeast and northward into Canada is part of a large-scale pattern that is keeping severe storms well below seasonal norms over much of the U.S.

On Tuesday, the U.S. set a record for the latest the nation has ever gone into a calendar year without a tornado death.

http://www.roanoke.com/weather/columns_and_blogs/columns/weather_journal/weather-journal-great-lakes-ice-has-chilling-effect/article_b536ec84-ca70-11e3-8c22-0017a43b2370.html?mode=print