About a year ago, researchers at the University of Michigan found that the extratropical cyclones that are the biggest drivers of winter weather in the Great Lakes region are warming and trending northward. That means, outside of the northern reaches of the region, residents can expect that their winters will be warmer and wetter on average.

Now, some of those same researchers have dug deeper to find more subtle connections between climate patterns playing out around the world and the Great Lakes’ extratropical cyclones. Now that these long-distance linkages, or teleconnections, have been revealed, understanding them better could help Great Lakes meteorologists better predict weather during any given winter, said study leader Abby Hutson.

“This has great implications for sub-seasonal to seasonal forecasting,” said Hutson, an assistant research scientist with the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research, or CIGLR. “These cold season cyclones, these big winter storms that impact the Great Lakes region, the weather in them and their activity are influenced by large, global interactions, but maybe not in the way we always think.”

The study, published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, was supported by federal funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, through CIGLR and a cooperative agreement with U-M. Hosted by the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability, CIGLR is a partnership between NOAA, universities, businesses and non-governmental organizations.

Study: Relationships between Great Lakes Extratropical Cyclone Characteristics and Global Teleconnections (DOI: 10.1029/2025JD045180)

Read the full press release on Michigan News.