Winter Temperatures Can Freeze Car Door Locks

Winter's bitter winds can freeze car door locks, windows and doors. Use these quick and easy tips to combat the ice.

Frozen Door Locks:

Nothing can be more frustrating than finding your car door locks frozen when you are ready to leave. One way to prevent this from happening is to place a magnet over the lock overnight, according to Rd.com.

Another way to prevent frozen locks is to dip your key into Vaseline, put it into the lock, and turn the lock back and forth a few times. Repeat this to make sure the Vaseline is well-distributed onto the parts of the lock. This method should be done once a week during winter months, according to Suite101.com. WD-40 can also prevent locks from freezing.

Icy car image by Photos.com

Frozen Car Door:

You can prevent your door from freezing shut by spraying the door frame with spray cooking lubricant like Pam.

If you have not treated the doors and find them frozen shut, try these steps to unfreeze them.

First, try all of the doors (including the hatch) to find the one least frozen. Do not try to force a frozen door open. This can damage the seal around the door.

Next, while wearing gloves, hit the ice with the palms of your hands, and remove the ice as it breaks.

If this method does not work, you can use a hair dryer to melt the ice.

Life-Threatening Cold to Grip Dakotas to New York

Dangerously cold air, perhaps the coldest of this entire winter season, is poised to invade the eastern half of the country over the next few days. In many places, if actual temperatures don't fall below zero, brutal winds will make it feel that way with life-threatening conditions resulting.

Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Indianapolis andMinneapolis are all included in the zone where AccuWeather.com RealFeel® temperatures will be below zero at some point this weekend or early next week. RealFeel® temperatures provide a measure of how cold it will feel with the wind factored in.

Across the Midwest and Great Lakes regions, these values will be below zero for as long as 36 or 48 hours. In Minneapolis, the actual temperature will stay below zero for this long. Cold this extreme can quickly lead to frostbite and life-threatening hypothermia.

What is even more alarming is that a major snowstorm will precede the cold blast from the Midwest to the Northeast. Snow, blowing snow, icy roads, and whiteout conditions will significantly increase the risk of travelers getting stranded out in the horrendously cold air.

Storm-Battered Antarctic Cruise Ship Limps Home

Video Shows It Being Tossed in High Seas; It's Heading to Argentine Port; 30-Foot Wave Knocked Out an Engine

An Antarctic cruise ship that broke down during a rough storm was slowly returning to its home port in Argentina Wednesday with 160 people on board.

High seas knocked out an engine on the Clelia II Tuesday, reportsCBS News Correspondent Elizabeth Palmer.

The captain said that, in nearly 160 trips to the Antarctic peninsula, he had never seen such weather.

The ship declared an emergency when it lost power and communications after a 30-foot wave washed over the deck and took out windows on the bridge in 55 mph winds.

None of the passengers, all of them American, was injured.

The ship was sailing from the Antarctic peninsula back to Argentina through the Drake Passage, one of the roughest stretches of water in the world.

Video of the Clelia II bobbing in high waves was filmed from another ship, the National Geographic Explorer, which saw the Clelia II in distress and stopped to monitor the situation. Crew members were able to rig a line to send a satellite phone over to the crippled ship.

The Clelia II was heading for home on reduced engine power.

The ship is operated by Polar Cruises of Bend, Oregon.

It was going to the port of Ushuia at the extreme south of Argentina at about 5 mph and was accompanied by a naval vessel, the Argentine Navy said.

The ship set out from Ushuaia on Nov. 30 and was scheduled to return on Wednesday.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDTbopUYg20

Lake effect: World's lakes warming due to climate change

The world's lakes are warming because of climate change, according to a study published last week in the journalGeophysical Research Letters, a publication of the American Geophysical Union.

In the first worldwide survey of how lake temperatures are changing due to greenhouse gas emissions, scientists report that the Earth's largest lakes have warmed at an average rate of 0.81 degree (F) per decade during the past 25 years. Some lakes warmed as much as 1.8 degrees per decade. The warming trend was global.

NASA scientists Philipp Schneider and Simon Hook used thermal infrared imagery from satellites to measure the surface temperatures of 167 large lakes worldwide.

In the USA, the warming was slightly higher in the Southwest than in the Great Lakes.

The largest and most consistent area of warming was northern Europe. The warming trend was slightly weaker in southeastern Europe, near the Black and Caspian seas and Kazakhstan. The trends increased slightly in Siberia, Mongolia and northern China.

"Our analysis provides a new, independent data source for assessing the impact of climate change over land around the world," says Schneider. "The results have implications for lake ecosystems, which can be adversely affected by even small water temperature changes."

Fresh water lakes make up only a tiny fraction of the water on Earth, when compared to the oceans: Oceans hold 97 percent of surface water, glaciers and polar ice caps 2.4 percent, and other land surface water such as rivers, lakes and ponds 0.6 percent.

According to the study, even small changes in water temperature can result in algal blooms that can make a lake toxic to fish or result in the introduction of non-native species that change the lake's natural ecosystem.

Climate change forecast is partly cloudy

Global warming's impact on clouds – and vice versa -- remains one of the biggest wild cards in climate science. A new study out this week in the journal Science, which finds that clouds will amplify global warming, is certain to fuel the discussion.

Study author Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M says that warming due to increases in greenhouse gases will cause clouds to trap more heat, which will lead to additional warming.

"It's a vicious cycle – warmer temperatures mean clouds trap more heat, which in turn leads to even more warming," Dessler explains.

As noted by Dressler in the paper, "Clouds affect the climate by reflecting incoming solar radiation back to space, which tends to cool the climate, and by trapping outgoing infrared radiation, which tends to warm the climate."

NASA: Stripe that disappeared on Jupiter coming back

A three-color composite image shows a belt that had previously vanished in Jupiter's atmosphere is now getting a bit darker and seems to be reappearing.

One of Jupiter's stripes that "disappeared" last spring is reappearing – and the disappearance was apparently an illusion created by Jupiter's atmosphere,NASA scientists said.

Scientists noticed earlier this year that the longstanding dark-brown stripe, called the South Equatorial Belt, had turned white, essentially disappearing. Researchers with NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility, the W.M. Keck Observatory and the Gemini Observatory telescope began studying the phenomenon and found the answer likely lies in a cloud deck made up of white ammonia ice that basically obscured the ring.

"The reason Jupiter seemed to 'lose' this band – camouflaging itself among the surrounding white bands – is that the usual downwelling winds that are dry and keep the region clear of clouds died down," said Glenn Orton, a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "One of the things we were looking for in the infrared was evidence that the darker material emerging to the west of the bright spot was actually the start of clearing in the cloud deck, and that is precisely what we saw."

Rare November tornadoes cause damage in Wis., Ill.

MILWAUKEE (AP) — Cleanup from a rare November tornado begins Tuesday in southeastern Wisconsin.

A confirmed tornado touched down in Walworth County, where four homes and four farm buildings were damaged. The National Weather Service says the tornado was an EF-1 and traveled about four miles.

An apparent twister also moved through Union Grove in Racine County, where semis were blown over and debris was spread over parts of Interstate 94. The weather service planned to send a crew to Racine County Tuesday to confirm whether the storm was a tornado.

Utility outages were widespread late Monday afternoon, with some 42,200 customers without power from northern Winnebago County east to Belvidere, ComEd spokesman Paul Callighan said. The utility said the storms hit 10 transmission towers in Boone County.

The fast-moving storm system also produced two apparent tornado touchdowns in southeastern Wisconsin.

By Monday night, the storm front had moved eastward into Indiana and Michigan, but much of northeastern Illinois remained under flash flood watches and warnings from the heavy rain that accompanied the storms.

Strong winds blast East Coast, flip over planes

TRENTON, N.J. (AP) — Powerful winds knocked out power to nearly 12,500 customers and damaged some small airplanes in New Jersey early Wednesday.

Accuweather also warned of damage throughout Pennsylvania from the winds, which were expected to gust up to 45 miles per hour through tonight.

Thousands of customers are without power across Pennsylvania after a series of overnight rain storms accompanied by strong winds.

Peco said it has 17,000 customers without power Wednesday morning. Peco spokeswoman Karen Muldoon Geus says wind gusts forecast to reach 45 mph during the day has the utility on guard for more outages.

Indonesia’s Volcano Erupts Again

MAGUWOHARJO, Indonesia — A powerful overnight eruption of Mount Merapi created chaos for Indonesia’s disaster response effort on Friday after an explosion of hot gases and debris killed scores of people and sent more than 160,000 villagers fleeing to underprepared evacuation camps.

Heavy white ash covered the runways at the airport in nearby Yogyakarta, forcing it to close Friday, The Associated Press reported. It was not clear when it would reopen.

The latest, unexpected eruption prompted authorities to extend the evacuation radius around Mount Merapi to 20 kilometers, or 12.5 miles, from 15 kilometers. An earlier eruption the day before had caused it to be extended from an initial 10 kilometers.

Despite chaos as authorities abandoned previous havens, Mr. Nugroho said it was the right approach to keep evacuees so close to the erupting volcano.

With tens of thousands evacuating camps, and tens of thousands more abandoning villages, police, troops and aid workers struggled to deal with crowds at new collection points further away from the smoldering mountain.

Twin Cities Snowstorm Cuts Power, Triggers Car Accidents

Early Snow Stuns Twin Cities

This could go down as one of the most significant snowstorms to strike the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area before the Thanksgiving holiday in two decades. The impacts were far reaching; from power outages to car accidents to flight cancellations.


The impacts were felt outside of Minnesota, as well. Two deaths from a car accident in Wisconsin are being blamed on the snowstorm.

Roughly 8 to 12 inches of heavy, wet snow has fallen over the Twin Cities since the snow began late Friday night.According to the Star Tribune, Greg Spoden at the Minnesota State Climate Office stated that this will probably be the biggest pre-Thanksgiving snowstorm for the Twin Cities since 1991, the year of the Halloween monster.

A storm system, which originated in the central Plains, intensified on Friday and into Saturday morning as it moved into Iowa and Wisconsin.

Snowy street in Minneapolis (AP photo)

Snow fell in earnest during the mid-morning hours over the Twin Cities metro area, at times at the rate of 1 inch per hour.

With a temperature hovering around the freezing mark, the snow that fell had a very high water content. This translates as a heavy snow that results in backbreaking shoveling, not the light and powdery kind.

The snow began to accumulate on tree branches and power lines and weighed them down considerably. The weighing of the snow led to the snapping of hundreds if not thousands of tree branches citywide, and power lines crashed to the ground.