A sign of the times is falling...

photo courtesy of accuweather
mid afternoon today

Heavy lake-effect snow hits Great Lakes states

CONSTABLEVILLE, N.Y. – A blast of cold wind spread snow along the Great Lakes from Michigan to New York on Monday, dumping 2 feet on this central New York town.

Snow doesn't usually fall this early in Constableville, librarian Dorothy Valenti said.

"Yesterday morning we had none. So it's quite a transition to go from no snow to all this. When you open the door, it's amazing," she said in a telephone interview. "It's strange to have a snow day before Thanksgiving."

Moisture from the lakes produced lake-effect snow on the eastern and southern shores of the lakes.

The deepest was in this snow-prone section of New York, where the National Weather Service said 24 inches had fallen at Constableville, at the east end of Lake Ontario on the Tug Hill Plateau. In western New York, moisture from Lake Erie had turned into 23 inches of snow by midmorning at Ellicottville, south of Buffalo.

In northwest Pennsylvania, Erie reported as much as 14 inches of snow Monday morning and several schools districts in the region closed or delayed classes.

Police reported numerous accidents on slippery roads in Pennsylvania, Ohio and New York.

The weather system producing the snow was moving toward the southeast, and a foot of snow was forecast in parts of Michigan, Indiana and Ohio on Tuesday.

It wasn't the first snowstorm this season in the Northeast. In late October, a storm spread just over a foot of snow over parts of northern New Jersey, northeast Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains and New York's Catskill Mountains, and heavy snow also fell at higher elevations of northern New England.

yahoo news report

Get ready folks for a cold winter...it is coming.

And, this from the National Weather Service

URGENT - WINTER WEATHER MESSAGE
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE NORTHERN INDIANA
1027 AM EST MON NOV 17 2008

...FIRST SIGNIFICANT LAKE EFFECT SNOW STORM OF THE SEASON...

.MUCH COLDER AIR WILL CONTINUE TO SPREAD SOUTH ACROSS THE GREAT LAKES INTO TUESDAY. ONGOING LAKE EFFECT SNOW SQUALLS WILL CONTINUE TO EXPAND AND INTENSIFY ACROSS SOUTHWEST MICHIGAN AND NORTHERN INDIANA THROUGH THIS AFTERNOON AND EVENING WITH LOCALLY HEAVY SNOW EXPECTED TONIGHT AND TUESDAY. LAKE EFFECT SNOW SQUALLS WILL MAINLY AFFECT PORTIONS OF SOUTHWEST MICHIGAN THROUGH THIS AFTERNOON WITH SEVERE RESTRICTIONS TO VISIBILITY TO NEAR ZERO...

NWS warning