Is Climate Change Shifting Where Dangerous Ice Storms Set Up?

Lewis County, Tennessee after the late January ice storm
Research suggests that climate change might be making
ice storms more common in the South, but more research
is needed to confirm that. Photo from Tennessee 
Valley Weather/Facebook

Are ice storms moving to different and potentially more dangerous places? 

Some scientists are beginning to think so, and that could lead to more frozen disasters like the one that blasted Mississippi, Tennessee and other southern states in late January

 Drawing on long term records, computer modeling and new measurement, scientists in Texas concluded that a warming world isn't making freezing rain go away. It's just changing where it falls and when in the winter it occurs. "

Zong-Liang Yang, an earth systems scientist the University of Texas at Austin and postdoctoral researcher Chenxi Hu looked into this. According to science.org:

"To see how these changes might be playing out in the ground, Yang and Hu turned to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations Storm Events Database, which compiles weather phenomena reported by individuals and vetted by the National Weather Service. 

When the researchers analyzed county-level  records from 1996 to 2025, they saw an emerging trend: More events along a band from eastern Texas to western Pennsylvania, as well as along the Appalachian Mountains, where low, cold air can get trapped. The timing of freezing ran events also shifted from December to February."

The locations Yang described here almost exactly match the zone affected by the disastrous late January ice storm,. 

Freezing rain is thankfully a bit hard to come by compared to other forms of precipitation. Snow needs to change to rain on the way down. Those raindrops must then encounter subfreezing air just before hitting the ground as liquid, which freezes into a glaze of ice upon impact.

If the cold layer near the ground is too thick, the rain will freeze into sleet, or little balls of ice on the way down. Sleet is a pain in the butt, of course, but at least it doesn't pull down trees and power lines. 

Also, freezing rain is often transitory. It'll hit briefly as an interlude between the time snow goes over to rain as temperatures warm. The warm/cold battle of air masses must more or less stay put to create a dangerous ice storm. 

Not everyone is buying the idea that climate change is shifting the places where ice storms are most likely - at least not yet

Esther Mullens, a climatologist at the University of Florida, told science.org that it still could be just natural variations that move ice storms around, or create trends in ice storms.

In 2025, Mullens looked at ice storms over the past 80 years and concluded that natural climate variations might explain the uptick in southern freezing rain storms. She concedes it could be that the jet stream is getting wavier than it used to be. 

A wavier jet stream is more likely to bring Arctic air blasts further south, which could increase the chances of freeing rain. But climatologists are still debating whether climate change is seriously messing with the jet stream like that. 

Still, there is a pretty compelling argument that the warming of the Arctic might be creating a wavier jet stream.  A wavier jet stream is more likely to create the right conditions for freezing rain than a flat west to east upper air flow.  

Another potential effect of climate change is it might affect how heavy the precipitation is. Even with a warmer world, it still very often gets below freezing in the mid-latitudes of the northern hemisphere during the winter. 

A warmer world, though, is a wetter world.  A hotter atmosphere can hold more water that a cooler one. Storms like the one that hit in January draw moisture from warmer places like the southern Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic Ocean or Caribbean.  That moisture slams into the cold air further north to fall as snow, sleet, freezing rain or a combination of all three.

Since the January storm was wetter than it would have been before climate change began in earnest, it was probably able to dump more ice and snow on the eastern U.S. that the same storm would have a generation or two ago.

The heavier the freezing rain, the more weight you get on trees and power lines. Snow in some storms might be deeper than it otherwise might be. We have anecdotal evidence of that right her in Vermont.Burlington's weather data goes all the way back to the late 1880s. Yet, 11 of the city's 20 biggest snowstorms all came in the past quarter century. 

You get the point. Winter storms can be counterintuitively worse in our era of climate change.  

Climate change can even make lake effect snowstorms worse. Lakes would be slower to freeze during warmer winters, so they'd have more opportunity to dump heavy snow downwind of the lakes on the days it does turn cold.

The data the Texas researchers used was based on reports by humans, who sometimes under-report or over-report the amount of ice during a freezing rain event. 

NOAA is working on a new tool that uses radar, rain gauges and an ice model to map freezing rain in real time, science.org says. 

The new tool would make an analysis like what Yang and Hu did more accurate, as we'd have more precise information on how much ice accumulated and where. 

All this shows that climate change isn't just about heat waves and warmer winters. Under the right conditions the warming world can make the rare wintry intrusions much worse. Worse, even, than what your grandparents remember when they walked through feet of snow to and from school, uphill both ways.