I'll say this...it feels like every time we've had a modicum of a threat in the last couple/few years (not counting January 2022), a low pops up somewhere in the Great Lakes region. Our thermals get wrecked and we're done for. Every. Single. Time.
I know that atmospheric physics is much more complicated than that one thing, but it's just too noticeable...and it's happening again with this storm. That Low that has been showing up near Lake Superior over the 36 hours or so of model runs, and as that thing has deepened just a little and edged ever closer to the Lakes, our thermals have gone to shit. Most of us were pretty close to the R/S line for many of these runs, but once that thing showed up where it did, we were done for.