Introducing the WUWT Great Lakes Ice Reference Page

re: Cold in Wisconsin says March 6, 2014 at 6:30 pm
Cold, I spent the winter of 78-79 on the MI side down by the water -er- ice! Got to witness all that ice as it built up (and the snow that fell) and packed it up near shore as the wind blew that winter!
It was dangerous to climb on that ‘pack ice’ … and not easy either … like climbing a small mountain ridge, with perils in the valleys … I much prefer it in Tejas these day.

Has anyone noticed that the freezing of the Great Lakes does not fit the mantra of a rapidly warming arctic as claimed by AGW? Once the sun sets in the arctic, the sea ice rapidly reforms and the radiational cooling of the surface is every bit as effective as it was in any prior years including the winter of 1978-79, regardless of a higher atmospheric CO2 concentration. That is why the bitter cold can penetrate southerly latitudes this year like it has done and shatter temperature records nearly a century old.
This ought to be a lesson to any with common sense that all of the recent claims made about “arctic amplification” and its implication to anthropogenic global warming are sheer nonsense, just like the claims made recently from two professors that “arctic amplification” was undoing the polar vortex, causing looping jet streams because of claimed weakening westerlies and causing bitter cold to affect mid latitudes which they claim normally doesn’t happen. They tried to bridge that gap by the improper use of Rossby wave theory from which I wrote an article to refute here:
http://blog.heartland.org/2014/02/about-that-persistent-polar-vortex/
“Arctic amplification” is a summer time phenomena that is caused by oceanic and wind currents that transport warmer air and water into this region and cause greater or lesser summer melt depending on the frequency. During the last phase of the PDO which was warm, a greater incidence of the ENSO signal was responsible for a greater northward transport of those Kelvin waves into the arctic sea than during the prior 30 years before 1977 and is no doubt a reason for the increased summer melt off. Now that the cold phase of the PDO is back with a changed solar magnetic I am betting the summer melting amount in the arctic will reverse. It has nothing to do with atmospheric CO2 as claimed by warmers.
Chuck Wiese
Meteorologist

Richard111 says:
Ice is an insulator. Ice reduces energy loss to space when it is dark. Of course, if the sun is up, ice then reflects more energy than it absorbs. Ice alone does not tell us everything about global climate.
Yes, but whether it means the local cooling of?

This recent Washington Post article “Confronting the exploitation of extreme weather events in global warming reporting”;
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2014/02/28/confronting-the-exploitation-of-extreme-weather-events-in-global-warming-reporting/
Justthefactswuwt if you can explain to me why no mention in this article (comments) that the jet stream is the result of the state of the polar vortex, which accelerates in winter in the STRATOSPHERE. Do people not know about this?

Jonathan Abbott says:
March 7, 2014 at 12:43 am
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There is significance with this level of change in the Great Lakes region. I have been watching sst anomalies for over a year now and saving the daily picture. I now have a record of the last 16 months for sst anomalies, so I can compare year to year changes at a glance. Last year at this time the lake waters were either average or showing a warm anomaly. Most of last year all of the lakes, except Superior at times, were showing warm anomalies of +1 to +2 above normal. Now they are all close to -2 on the sst anomaly. That is a dramatic shift.
Also dramatic is the sst change in the northern oceans from last year. The ‘hot’ anomalies are now subdued warm spots with strong cooling advancing in large regions of the oceans. The North Atlantic in particular now has a strong patch of cold surface water that stretches from Nova Scotia all the way to Europe In a wide swath. I can’t help but think that the polar vortex cold sweeping eastward has initiated this shift. This is also where the Great Lakes influence should have a continued cooler effect that will drift eastward for many months to come.

Here in New Hampshire, we have a “Great Lake” of our own, Lake Winnipesaukee, and while extent of ice cover to my knowledge has never been tracked, for 126 years (since 1887) the “ice-out” date has been tracked. Ice-out is declared when the M/S Mount Washington would be able to reach all 5 of its ports of call. The latest date recorded, in 1888 was May 12, and the earliest, in 2012 was March 23. Year-to-year fluctuations are typically 2-3 weeks, and sometime 4 weeks. Last year was solidly in the middle, at April 17. This year, due to the extreme cold extending well into this month, I’m guessing ice-out could be around May 1. The last May ice-out was in 2001, May 2, and the time before that was in 1972, also on May 2 (it was on May 6 the previous year).