Overhead lines come into contact with trees, high winds, rain and ice storms.
In Wisconsin, storms with rain and ice caused about 30, 000 outages.
The forecast for past several days has been terrible with warnings and advisories for gusting winds, heavy rain and ice and several inches of snow slated to blow into the Philadelphia area.
Met Office warnings for ice, rain and snow have also been issued across parts of England, Wales and Scotland for Friday and Saturday.
Snow, ice, rain and sleet have affected many parts of the county, with 2-5cm (1-2in) of snow expected later and up to 5-10cm (2-4in) on high ground.
But overnight rain left large patches of ice on the course, making it too dangerous.
They've seen plenty of action in and around the arctic, melting ice, more rain and disappearing glaciers.
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Then, when snow or rain wash them onto an ice floe, they darken its surface and thus cause it to melt faster.
The same brutal Arctic cold front that's already delivered subzero temperatures across the upper Midwest and Northeast is forecast to bring ice and freezing rain to the South and Mid-Atlantic states on Friday.
Firefighters said the flooding was caused by a mixture of heavy rain and rising temperatures thawing snow and ice, and have warned people to listen to forecasts.
In Minnesota on Monday, people were watching the ice there melt, a steady rain helping the process, Tetrault said.
The council blamed "exceptional levels of rain last year, followed by snow and ice", which caused damage "across the country".
The Franz Josef glacier on the west side of the Southern Alps of New Zealand advanced sharply during the period of the Little Ice Age, actually invading a rain forest at its maximum extent in the early 1700s.
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The fear is that melting ice, along with increased snow and rain, could reduce the density and salinity of the top layers of the sea, making them more buoyant.
One way to increase the probability of rain is to seed the formation not of water droplets, but of ice crystals, an important step in precipitation.
In China, they use artillery shells, rockets and airplanes to spray existing cloud systems with silver iodide, a compound that triggers moisture in the clouds to form ice crystals, which then fall to earth as snow or rain.
In the upper Midwest, thousands of homes and businesses also lost power because of heavy wet snow, ice and wind in the past couple of days, while rain and snow raised flooding concerns in various areas of the Midwest.
Rain Gear: I have extensively tested rains suits from various manufacturers, mostly in the harsh elements of Scotland and Ireland, and my general advice is that any of the major brands, including Sunderland, Sun Ice, Adidas, Nike, etc. will keep you pretty dry in normal rain conditions.
Ice cover loss can influence winds and precipitation on other continents, possibly leading to less rain in the western United States and creating more in Europe.
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