The Great Lakes

Great Lakes Ice Cover Is the Largest We've Seen This Century

MODIS satellite image of the Great Lakes on Feb. 7, 2014. Bright white in this image shows mainly clouds over the Great Lakes, however, you can see lake ice in southern and western Lake Michigan, southern Lake Superior, and far western Lake Erie. (UW-SSEC/Google Earth)

the Weather Channel,

8 February, 2013

One effect of the persistently cold winter of 2013-2014 is showing up on the world's largest group of freshwater lakes.

According to an analysis by NOAA's Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, ice covered 78.7 percent of the Great Lakes on February 6. Not since early 1996 has ice been so widespread on the Great Lakes.

This is an abrupt turn around from the past four winters, during which the peak ice coverage remained around 40 percent or less. As you can see in the graph below, the 40-year average is just over 51 percent.

Yearly peak Great Lakes ice coverage (percent) from 1973-2013. (NOAA/GLERL)

Dating to 1973, the two years with the largest ice coverage were 1979 (94.7 percent peak) and 1994 (90.7 percent).

Ice on Lake Michigan as far as you can see to the horizon in Feb. 2014. (Louise Olson via The Weather Channel Facebook page)

When looking at individual lakes, just over 92 percent of Lake Superior, just under 88 percent of Lake Huron, almost 95 percent of Lake Erie, and around 53 percent of Lake Michigan is ice covered. Much deeper Lake Ontario is only about 29 percent of ice covered.

As a result, caves near the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore are now open to foot traffic, thanks to sufficiently thick ice on Lake Superior.

Winter weather expert for The Weather Channel, Tom Niziol (Twitter | Facebook), noted the current Great Lakes ice cover was pacing quite close to that from early February 1977, another year in which the peak ice cover topped 90 percent.

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Let's compare the current ice cover to the early February ice cover in the two standard-bearing years mentioned above:

Feb. 5, 1979: 66.8%

Feb. 7, 1994: 83.6%

So, we're pacing ahead of 1979 but behind 1994.

Through most of the upcoming week, temperatures will remain generally much colder than average over the Midwest and Northeast.

Beyond that, there are some preliminary indications the cold may finally ease up the following week, but that outlook remains too uncertain at this time.

US: Changes in Great Lakes

Lake Superior is so hot right 

now!

By Philip Bump

Grist,

24 July, 201

Lake Superior is the largest and northernmost Great Lake, containing almost three times as much water as Lake Michigan, the second largest in volume. In fact, it contains more water than the other Great Lakes combined. Which should mean that it’s cold.

Calling it hot is a stretch — but all of that water is heating up far more than expected. From Climate Central (which is also the source of the graph):

As the above chart shows, based on the 30-year average, the lake’s average water temperature should be in the mid-50s. But thanks to scant lake ice cover this past winter, along with a rare March heat wave and warmer-than-average weather since then, the lake began warming earlier than normal, and that warming has kept right on going. Wintertime ice cover on the Great Lakes was the lowest observed since such records began in 1980.

The chart itself is pretty amazing. At no point in 2012 has the surface temperature been below average, and it’s now spiking well above. Temperatures today range from 70 degrees at the southern shore to 60 at the northern-most points.

(NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory — the fun-to-say GLERL — also has a near-real-time animated map of surface currents, but that is mentioned solely because it is cool.)

Over the long term, all of the lakes are getting warmer, leading perspicacious scientists to think that this might be linked to that “climate change” thing.

Data shows a long-term warming trend throughout the Great Lakes, which may be related to manmade climate change. According to George Leskevich, a physical research scientist with the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory in Ann Arbor, Mich., there is also a long-term downward trend in Great Lakes wintertime ice cover, although there is considerable year-to-year variability.

The really bad news is for the Canadians who live east of the lake.

Ironically, if the lakes enter the fall with record warm temperatures, it could herald an above-average season for lake effect snow, which occurs when cold, dry air blows across large expanses of comparatively milder waters.

At which point we’ll hear all about how global warming is a myth.