Lake Superior sets a new record for winter ice cover, other lakes are icing up fast.
Lake Superior is 92 percent frozen on the surface, breaking a 20-year-old record of 91 percent set on Feb. 5, 1994. Temperatures continue well below freezing. Have a look at this graph:
As far as all the lakes go, here is the plot of historical maximums:
![IceCoverAvg1973_2013[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/icecoveravg1973_20131.jpg?quality=83)
The number to break is 94.7, set in 1979, which is also a year of some of the worst winter weather ever in the USA, and coincidentally, the peak year year when Arctic sea ice trends were begun via satellite measurements. Right now we are at 78.5%. Just a week ago the ice cover was 66 percent.
Source image (click for update) http://www.glerl.noaa.gov/res/glcfs/glcfs.php?lake=l&ext=ice&type=N&hr=00
UPDATE: this graph from the Canadian Ice Service shows how much above the median the Great lakes have been:
![20140203180000_CVCSWCTGL_0007500871[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/20140203180000_cvcswctgl_00075008711.gif)
This graph shows by year, 2014 is now in third place:
![20140203180000_CVCHDCTGL_0007500868[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/20140203180000_cvchdctgl_00075008681.gif)
References:
Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory
http://www.glerl.noaa.gov/data/ice/
Modis Imagery:
http://coastwatch.glerl.noaa.gov/modis/modis.php?region=g&page=1
Canadian Ice Service:
http://iceweb1.cis.ec.gc.ca/Prod20/page2.xhtml?CanID=11080&lang=en
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
@Tom in Florida
It is getting better.
See ‘Atmospheric river’ of rain pointed at Northern California
wws says:
February 8, 2014 at 6:13 am
“to Tom in Florida – of course it’s just weather, but it IS so much fun to say it’s “climate change” for two good reasons ……………..”
I understand completely, however Florida was 10 F above average the last week or so. We should never fall into the “weather is climate” crap that warmistas use all the time. But I do agree, we must constantly point out how actual weather trumps their modeled climate predictions.
Why does Lake Ontario and Lake Michigan not freeze over? Is it the waste heat from Toronto, Chicago and Detroit?
Wow! A quarter of the Northern Forest hardwoods are Ash, I hadn’t thought in those terms. I know that there are an estimated half-Billion (500,000,000) Ash in Wisconsin.
Unless a prompt cure/solution to EAB disease is found, all Ash trees will be killed. ATM it is costing an average $100 per tree for preemptive removal from private property, presumably as much to the taxpayer for removal from public property. I have identified one in my 5+ acres.
Is that spike in the early 90’s the result of the VEI 6 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo?
Question: The graph of the temperature of the center of Lake Superior never shows a temperature below zero, yet it looks like it’s a plot of hourly temperatures. At night in central WI it’s been hitting -20F and colder, well south of Lake Superior. Some days it doesn’t get to more than +2 to +4F so even if the graph is recording some sort of moving average it would show negative numbers around here. Yet it never goes below 0F on Lake Superior?
Explanation anyone? I find it hard to believe that graph isn’t recording some temps in the area of -20 to -30F at times this winter.
In “Grand Minimum of the Total Solar Irradiance Leads to the Little Ice Age”, November 25, 2013, Habibullo Abdussamatov said:
“Let us note that the level of maximum of the 11-year component of TSI has decreased within five years of the 24th cycle by ~0.7 Wm-2 with respect to the maximum level of the 23rd cycle. The Earth as a planet will have also a negative balance in the energy budget in the future, because the Sun has entered the decline phase of the quasibicentennial cycle of the TSI variations. This will lead to a drop in the temperature and to the beginning of the epoch of the Little Ice Age approximately after the maximum of solar cycle 24 since the year 2014.”
I believe he meant “after the maximum of solar cycle 24 in the year 2014.”.
See http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/grand_minimum.pdf
NYT never gives up
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/08/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-snow.html?emc=edit_tnt_20140207&tntemail0=y&_r=2
Soon, I will be swimming in a 75+ degree Lake Michigan. It is this thought that is helping me get through this winter. Sneaking out into traffic that you cannot see for the snowbanks are too tall and the endless shoveling and raking can wear on the body and the soul, but summer is but a stone’s throw away.
Very unlikely that Lake Michigan freezes totally.
My point is that declining snowpack has been projected for the contiguous United States. Winter I vaguely recollect is up since the 1960s, spring is down. It could still be a sign of a changing climate. We will have to wait and see. Let me remind you that ‘children won’t know what snow is’
Not long ago there were reports of snow in Florida.
http://www.mynews13.com/content/news/cfnews13/news/article.html/content/news/articles/cfn/2014/1/28/snow_in_florida.html
I live right on Lake Superior at Duluth, MN. Trust me this is the coldest winter that I remember since 1979. We have had periods of below 0 temps for weeks. Windchills down to the -40s. It is a cold, bitter winter. With the ice on Lake Superior, it will be a very cold spring and a short summer. Florida is in my future.
Rod Everson says: February 8, 2014 at 7:28 am
“Question: The graph of the temperature of the center of Lake Superior never shows a temperature below zero, yet it looks like it’s a plot of hourly temperatures.”
Houghton, MI weather history shows 6 days average temp below Zero F
http://classic.wunderground.com/history/airport/KCMX/2014/2/8/MonthlyHistory.html#calendar
See the previous month
http://classic.wunderground.com/history/airport/KCMX/2014/1/8/MonthlyHistory.html
1979 is also the year when the 30y moving average of the AMO hit the bottom.
@DipChip: Interesting. It’s been quite a bit warmer there than a couple hundred miles south in Wisconsin. We had about 20 below F last night and our highs are running between zero and 10 degrees lately. I know western MI is warmer in winter due to a lake effect. Is the same true of your area? Frankly, given our temps I’d have thought you’d be seeing lows of -30 pretty regularly the past month or so.
I think it’s very likely the Great Lakes will set a record for actual measured ice cover this year. It should be noted that the 94.7% “record” number (93.9% from Canadian Ice Service) is an adjusted value, which includes “interpolated” data. Not shockingly, the interpolated data adds the most ice to the earlier years and not the recent years, making the ice loss over time worse than we thought.
According the the CIS, the highest actual measured ice cover appears to be ~86-87%. ( http://bit.ly/1jmi2YG )
What makes it very likely is that it is still a few weeks away from when the normal max ice occurs ( http://bit.ly/1bcQId7 ) and temps are predicted to continue to be below normal over the next few weeks ( http://1.usa.gov/1njwqOG ).
hmmmm. These lakes drain quite a bit of territory. As in if you don’t like the river you are fishing in, drive or hike the short distance to the next one. I am betting there are plenty of ice dams at all those river and swamp drainage points. Ice dams cause flooding upstream, which if cold enough, freezes that. Eventually you have a plugged system from stem to sturn. The entire system, when unplugged, sends a torrent of fresh water out to the Atlantic Ocean. I seem to recall this scenario on a bigger scale, being theoretically connected to pre-historic catastrophic climate change.
More signs of climate change?
North America winter snow extent trending up since 1967
http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/chart_seasonal.php?ui_set=namgnld&ui_season=1
Northern hemisphere winter snow extent trending up since 1967
http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/chart_seasonal.php?ui_set=nhland&ui_season=1
Northern hemisphere spring snow extent trending down since 1967
http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/chart_seasonal.php?ui_set=nhland&ui_season=2
Jimbo says:
February 8, 2014 at 7:45 am
“Not long ago there were reports of snow in Florida.
http://www.mynews13.com/content/news/cfnews13/news/article.html/content/news/articles/cfn/2014/1/28/snow_in_florida.html”
Well only in the panhandle which is really Alabama anyways. But that was the tail end of a passing storm that clobbered the Northeast. We get those tail ends all the time, a couple of years ago it went below 28 F in February at my house which is well south of Tampa. This year is more normal, some cool days, some warmer days but all within the normal weather patterns for my area.
I prefer colored maps, especially those that give a percentage of ice related to open water: i.e. , 9/10 (red) and so on to 1/10 (blue) and gray, fast ice.
Environment Canada shows the coloring and the numbering it uses to gauge how much ice there is:
http://iceweb1.cis.ec.gc.ca/Prod20/page2.xhtml?CanID=11080&Lang=en
The query from up thread as to why Lake Michigan and Lake Ontario are late to completely cover with ice, my reasoning is as follows:
The Great Lakes are but widening in a river that extends from a Northern Ontario water catchment area to the Atlantic Ocean via the St. Lawrence River. Warm land surface water flows into these colder basins more on the surface, especially Lake Superior and Northern Lake Huron. The warm land surface water of Lake Superior flows into the connector of Lake Michigan and Lake Huron at the Straits of Mackinac. Lake Michigan has no natural exit so the warm water remains on the surface and keeps Lake Michigan from icing over completely.
Lake Superior ices over as it is not only colder to begin with, but is no longer receiving warm land surface water because that is now mostly frozen.
Lake Huron ices over because the warmer surface water can exit via its natural outlet of the St Clair River to the Detroit River and out into Lake Erie. Lake Erie ices over first because it is shallow and looses it heat at depth quickly and has a short transit time compared to the other Great Lakes. The warm land surface water passes beneath the ice to flow into the Niagara River and over Niagara Falls.
Lake Ontario is the last Great Lake to ice over because it is the recipient of the relatively warm land surface waters for the whole catchment area of the Great Lakes. Notice how the Western Region of Lake Ontario has not iced over where the Eastern region is already iced significantly.
Food for thought
Here in Montana, this winter has been similar to the rough ones in the 1970’s. I live in one of the “banana belt” areas of the state that are blessed with Chinook winds that periodically melt the snow, but I have had snow in my yard and ice in my driveway since about October 8th. Last week we had a morning with -33 degrees F. real temperature and a wind chill of -45 F. Some places in the state had wind chills in the -50 degree range. Ranchers here are calving, and many of the calves have frozen ears and tails. Today it got above zero just to start snowing again. It is usually worse over in the Bakken where they are finding lots of oil:
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/view/prodsByState.php?state=MT&prodtype=hourly
Re: John A, why Ontario does not freeze over
Ontario and Michigan are both very deep compared to Erie, 800 and 900 feet deep respectively. They have a larger resevoir of heat to keep them ice free longer. Superior is of course deep but much further north and subject to cooler temperatures.
In reply to:
Tom in Florida says:
February 8, 2014 at 6:02 am
Hold on their Kimosabe. Are you forgetting the drought and very low snow pack in the western U.S.? More likely just weather from a chaotic system.
William:
The sudden increase in cold weather and the other change in weather patterns is occurring in both hemispheres (i.e. the fact there is a sudden change in both hemispheres is evidence that the climate is changing in response to a forcing change that can simultaneously effect both hemispheres rather than internal processes, so called chaos) and correlates with the most rapid reduction in the solar magnetic cycle in 10,000 years. There are cycles of warming and cooling in the paleo record that correlate with solar magnetic cycle changes. The question is not if solar magnetic cycle changes cause cyclic climate change but rather how.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulhudson/posts/Real-risk-of-a-Maunder-minimum-Little-Ice-Age-says-leading-scientist
“According to Professor Lockwood the late 20th century was a period when the sun was unusually active and a so called ‘grand maximum’ occurred around 1985. Since then the sun has been getting quieter. By looking back at certain isotopes in ice cores, he has been able to determine how active the sun has been over thousands of years. Following analysis of the data, Professor Lockwood believes solar activity is now falling more rapidly than at any time in the last 10,000 years. He found 24 different occasions in the last 10,000 years when the sun was in exactly the same state as it is now – and the present decline is faster than any of those 24.”
2013/2014 Antarctic sea cover month by month is the highest in ‘recorded’ history. Curious there is no media coverage concerning that fact. (i.e. Why the sudden increase in sea ice?)
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_stddev_timeseries.png
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic.png
I travelled the north coast of Lake Superior weekly between Marathon and Sault Ste. Marie in 94 and other years. it was a wicked winter. In one blizzard I was driving with about 10 metres visibility at a very slow pace on Highway 17 south of Montreal River. Thank goodnesses it was very slow.
Out of the snow being driven parallel to the ground by strong winds, I was suddenly looking way up at a cow Moose standing in the middle of where the road would be if not covered in snow. Adrenaline flowed immediately as I braked and stopped inches away. She did not move but looked down at me curiously. And I was driving a 4X4 with a higher clearance than most vehicles. At some of our historic buildings we left the water running 24/7 to avoid the lines freezing.
This winter has been similar with lots of snow and cold, not unlike the 94-95 winter where we received a deluge that collapsed some roofs.
@Tom in Florida –
The drought in the West is reminiscent of the drought at the end of the 13th century, as the MWP was coming to a close – the drought that wiped out the cliff dwellers and the Anasazi. It’s mjust possible that the drought might be a marker, an indicator, of a prolonged cold period analogous to the LIA.