At night, as cold settles in, lake ice creaks and groans. It’s been excessively cold, and I camped exposed on the snow-swept surface. Other than the lack of vegetation and the sounds at night, you’d never know you were on a lake. It feels like an empty plain. In some places, you see pressure ridges where ice has pushed into itself, sticking up like clear blue stegosaurus plates. — Craig Childs
Author Craig Childs is not describing an Arctic lake. He’s describing the bitterly cold and frozen scene on Lake Superior, during his February 2014 trek on the ice near the coast of Ashland, Wisconsin.
Zoom out to view the scene from a satellite perspective and it’s apparent that Lake Superior is not the only lake to feel the freeze. The true-color image above, from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite, shows the mostly frozen state of the Great Lakes on Feb. 19. On that date, ice spanned 80.3 percent of the lakes, according to NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory in Ann Arbor, Mich.
The ice reached an even greater extent on Feb. 13, when it covered about 88 percent of the Great Lakes – coverage not achieved since 1994, when ice spanned over 90 percent. In addition to this year, ice has covered more than 80 percent of the lakes in only five other years since 1973. The average annual maximum ice extent in that time period is just over 50 percent. The smallest maximum ice cover occurred in 2002, when only 9.5 percent of the lakes froze over.
Scientists say it’s understandable that the Great Lakes have had so much ice this year considering the cold temperatures in the region that persisted through the winter. Cold air temperatures remove heat from the water until it reaches the freezing point, at which point ice begins to form on the surface, explained Nathan Kurtz, cryospheric scientist NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
“Persistently low temperatures across the Great Lakes region are responsible for the increased areal coverage of the ice,” Kurtz said. “Low temperatures are also the dominant mechanism for thickening the ice, while secondary factors like clouds, snow, and wind also play a role.”
The freeze this year has local implications, including possible changes to snowfall amounts in the Great Lakes area, explained Walt Meier, also a cryospheric scientist at NASA Goddard. When the lakes are primarily open water, cold air picks up moisture from the relatively warm and moist lake water, often resulting in lake effect snow on the lee side of the lakes, on the eastern and southern shores. When the lakes freeze, the lake effect generally shuts down. “Although this year, they’re still picking up a fair amount of snow,” Meier said.
Lake levels could also see an impact by summer, as winter ice cover generally reduces the amount of water available to evaporate during winter months. If that turns out to be the case, it would be “good news for local water supplies, as well as for shipping and recreational use,” Meier said.
It remains to be seen when the Great Lakes will once again freeze to the extent reached in 2014, or at least enough to allow adventurers to reach the ice caves at Lake Superior’s Apostle Islands National Lakeshore by foot.
A 2012 study in the Journal of Climate by scientists at NOAA’s Great Lakes lab, which included data from MODIS, found that winter season ice cover on Lake Superior has decreased 79 percent from 1973 to 2010. The study also showed that ice cover on the lakes is highly variable and difficult to predict.
The harsh season this year “is a reminder that winters are variable and that weather can always throw an outlier our way,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist and climate modeler at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.
Source: NASA AQUA satellite page
================================================================
Readers might note that the reason that the ice coverage abruptly went from 88% to 80% likely had to do with wind compacting the ice, not any temperature change – Anthony
Related: The Great Lakes may hit record ice cover this year
@ur momisugly C. Jones (re: snow front) — NEATO!
@ur momisuglyAkatsu — lol.
@ur momisugly Herr Brozek — Guten tag. #(:)) Way to refute the propaganda!
Leo Geiger says:
March 1, 2014 at 12:41 pm
*************************************
And what is notable about January is the large high pressure area off the coast of the pacific NW and over Alaska that well do what high pressure areas do – allow air to sink, compress and warm.
That high appears to have acted like a huge ‘fan’ or pump since the air was then forced over the north pole where it cooled and subsequently spilled south over the remainder of north america.
With the high now gone and cold air still spilling south it will be interesting how the temps fare.
Don’t forget, that humans, first convert the kinetic energy to mech/electrical. It works for both the U.S. and Can. citizens mainly. GK
Leo Geiger
I also believe in man made global warming you only have to look at this graph to see it.
http://stevengoddard.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/1998changesannotated.gif?w=500&h=355
Thanks to Steve we can see where most of the records you quote come from, yep real man made global warming. Unfortunately for us most of it is on paper or in modern times resides it the fraudsters computers. One last thing the number they come up with, even without manipulation, it really doesn’t tell us much, they are trying to find some kind of signal when the “noise” outruns the so call signal. Maybe if we had honest people collecting and preserving the data in few hundred years we might be able to make some definitive statements about what happening but where we are at is like prediction that a two year old might be a great athlete.
So little data so much to know, unfortunately far too many people their egos will not let allow them to admit that. One last parting shot I certain that graph was post here keep reading this site and do go to Steve site you might learn there is far more to this than the one metric you like to point to, and most don’t really tell us anything other than what happen this day, this month this year and this century can tell very little about what will tomorrow bring let alone next month, next year of a century from now. When it come to climate prediction the Farmers alimac it about just as useful and anyone else’s long range predictions. I don’t put much weight in any of them.
CaligulaJones
You photo looks a lot like Phoenix in the summertime you only have to change the white to brown, and add about hundred degrees to the temp and you have it. Oh by the way the weather in Mesa was beautiful yesterday, had the patio door open all day, today not so much something strange and wet is falling out of the sky, kinda forgotten what it is.
Rub it in, Luhman, rub it in. Grrr. #(;))
(I live in NW Wash. St..)
Janice Moore says:
March 1, 2014 at 1:24 pm
Danke schoen!
Regarding photos of ice banks, don’t try drilling a hole and icefishing in front of those giant shoreline ice banks unless you are prepared to poke through 8 to 10 FEET of solid ice chunks and slush below your hole. There is a lot more ice there than meets the eye. The same forces that make huge ice banks also pile up ice in front of the banks, usually most of the way to the bottom. Then it freezes on top and all that ice is locked in place. You may have to go 100 yards or more away from the banks to get into clear water under your ice fishing hole.
Joe Bastardi has a good handle on March, as he does most everything weather. Better buy more heaters for east of the Rockies.
CaligulaJones says:
March 1, 2014 at 1:07 pm
“BTW, this is what it looks like coming in”
Of course you don’t see it coming when you are on the ground.
http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/02/27/highway-400-closed-between-highway-89-and-mapleview-drive-after-massive-96-car-pileup-near-barrie/
When someone such as Leo G. suggests I ought to be concerned about warming of Earth’s atmosphere, I look here:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/
Sometimes, just for a change I look at the RSS chart. Anyway, the Jan. 2014 departure from the 1981-2010 mean is shown as +0.29 C. degree. During these years almost nothing has happened. I can walk from my bedroom into my bathroom and then to the living room and the temperature will change that much. Outside, native trees, shrubs, and grasses are the same as they were when this valley was first visited by white folks about 200 years ago. Back in Pennsylvania where I was raised, I can add another 200 years to that and say the same thing. [Native Chestnuts excluded, of course.] And the gentle poking people Leo hears from in Europe can say the same thing, just add a few more years to the total.
And Leo, that first paragraph you wrote – it is just made up stuff. No one cares a wit about the stuff you make up.
A lot of useless tautology in the statements Nathan Kurtz makes. Scientists say… plug in a kettle and the water warms, step on the accelerator and the car goes, water is wet…
You say “cold winter weather becoming less common”.
Northern Hemisphere winter snow extent has been trending up since 1967. The last six years look pretty ‘normal’ to me.
http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/chart_seasonal.php?ui_set=nhland&ui_season=1
Leo Geiger mus be living in the Bahamas. 😉
Leo Geigher says “North America is not the world, and weather is not climate.”
We chaps here know this. We also know that if North America had a warm, dry winter they would be shrieking like wild parakeets about global warming. As for weather not being the climate I agree . Tell that to the Warmists who tell us about loaded dice.
Sorry, bad linking. The “I agree” link is HERE.
Jimbo says:
March 1, 2014 at 4:09 pm
His head up his Bahamas.
I dunno … I predicted cold for this winter, but this extended and this much?? … for 3 months+ … and now Lake Michigan is threatening to do a freeze over again. And I bet if you flew over just before thawing weather it would be frozen solid. I don’t think the mainstream media will allow it to be said if it is frozen over. I think it will have frozen over twice by then (once before the very short thaw).
I grew up on Lake Michigan(I am 61 y.o. now) and this winter is epic. Just as Dr. Easterbrook has testified before Congress that the government agencies have doctored the data he deals with to make it look warmer now … I am pretty sure they have doctored the ice data and what we are being told/shown. Just look at the linked graph on the post by RealOldOne above … interpolated ice added only on older years … Several times this winter NOAA and CIS have changed the way they were presenting the map data at times that would be ripe for manipulating or confusing the issue of actual ice coverage.
I did my M.S. thesis on the time from the last glacial maximum (about 15,000 years ago) to present (in Geology), and you could easily see the fallacies in Mann’s hockey stick if you were familiar with this time frame. Now it is infamous, yet that point is obfuscated in the MSM.
If a little ice age or major ice age was going to start, IMO these last couple of years is what it would look like. Epic extended cold and record colds in multiple places (Europe last year) … very unusual events at lower latitudes like snow on the pyramids and multiple snow covered roof collapse in Japan … Antarctic ice growing strong, solar irradiance low and going lower .. some epic cold spells in South America. And certainly not least of all the temps in our mid-continent were very cold for December, January, February, and now thru mid-March at least … way below normal. The areas it was this cold are right where previous ice sheets have descended.
On the bright side … I have moved to Hawai’i so I don’t have to worry about it too much … but I have to say I now understand what those that study climate and frequent this blog go through dealing with the global alarmists. It is absurd and it hurts science. At least we know how Galileo felt!
Point being, the weather we are getting globally, is NOT what the CAGW or AGW crew predicted.. Is it Leo? We were supposed to be burning by now. I have heard for 35 years “the warming is coming”. Well, we are still within KNOWN climate ranges, unless you deny the warm periods and the cold periods that are KNOWN to have occurred. Unprecedented (outlier in this case) is used when it only reveals ignorance on the subject. Even the speed at which it is occurring is not unusual when you know what is in the literature. But that stuff doesn’t count, does it?
All regulars here are aware of weather records covering all ranges, from surface temperature stations (surfacestations,org, which you should take a close look at, by the way), to solar activity (TSI, CME’s, Magnetic field,etc) to the inconvenient paleo-records (Geologic, historic, etc.).
Time to look at the information that you will find distasteful, Leo.
The weather in the US isn’t the world, but this isn’t suppose to be happening according to prediction by the AGW community. And yes if was a mild winter here in the US, AGW would have been shrilling about how it is global warming. Which weather events are they talking about that are not normal or cyclic now? A rouge rain storm in California? They were saying the same thing about the drought in the Midwest. I have an idea, have them look up the PDO.
Re: Mars having more CO2 than Edmonton
Atmospheric pressure on Mars average 7-8 millibars, 95% CO2.
CO@ur momisugly partial pressure at Edmonton ~1,000 millibars x .0004 = 0.4 millibar partial pressure
Q.E.D.
When it is cold, blame the weather.
When it is warm, blame the Climate.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch.
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/its-a-dry-cold.html
Leo Geiger, the loyal AGW scientists don’t seem to have got the memo about this being the warmest January since 2007… http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/02/28/the-top-ten-reasons-global-temperature-hasnt-warmed-for-the-last-15-years/ – for a handy list of AGW true believers papers of excuses as to why it hasn’t. You’d think that the ones pubbed in 2014 could have put a ‘yay it’s stopped pausing’ addendum if it had, or published loudly on the net. So… as it is so warm all over the world except the US – what was that about snow in Cairo?
Leo Geiger says: March 1, 2014 at 12:41 pm
You are throwing out 92% of the data when you discard the other months of the year.