After the Storm

AAAS: “[As the world warms, freezing rain shifts to the U.S. South](http://As the world warms, freezing rain shifts to the U.S. South).” Zong-Liang Yang, an earth systems scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, stated, “Compared to those big natural disasters, [freezing rain is] relatively understudied.” One surprising result of climate disruption is freezing rain isn’t vanishing — but it’s shifting in location and timing. “We want to make an urgent warning that these kinds of winter hazards won’t be less frequent under a warmer climate,” reported postdoctoral researcher Chenxi Hu, who works with Yang. Instead, in the U.S., they are occurring later in winter, and moving toward the southeast. “Freezing rain requires finicky conditions…the air must be layered like a cold-warm-cold sandwich: Precipitation that begins as snow high in the atmosphere, melts to rain as it falls, then gets shocked with cold just before landing to freeze on contact as characteristically sticky ice.”

Using top regional climate models, “Dominique Paquin, an atmospheric physicist and climate modeler, and her colleagues simulated more than 3500 years’ worth of the North American atmosphere.” The chilling finding was that temperature changes of less than 1°C can alter whether winter precipitation will arrive as sleet, hail, snow, or freezing rain. “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.” Further, the timing of freezing rain events also shifted from December to February.

“Esther Mullens, a climatologist at the University of Florida, isn’t convinced that global warming is responsible for the shifts Yang and Hu found.” In 2025 Mullens studied North American freezing rain events over the past 80 years, using a mix of modeled and empirical weather data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. “She found natural climate variations could explain an increased number of freezing rain events in the U.S. South.” A county in Louisiana received the highest reading ever seen from an airport sensor: 22 mm [= 0.87 inches] of freezing rain. Painful. And dangerous.