Remember this alarmist whining from Joe Romm’s Climate Progress last year?
Great Lakes Michigan and Huron set a new record low water level for the month of December, and in the coming weeks they could experience their lowest water levels ever. It’s becoming certain that, like the rest of the country, the Great Lakes are feeling the effects of climate change.
Last year was officially the warmest year on record for the lower-48 states. The hot summer air has been causing the surface water of the Great Lakes to increase in temperature. One might think this causes more precipitation around the lakes, but the warmer winter air is causing a shorter duration of ice cover. In fact, the amount of ice covering the lakes has declined about 71 percent over the past 40 years. Last year, only 5 percent of the lakes froze over –- compared to 1979 when ice coverage was as much as 94 percent.
What a difference a year makes.
Current data from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers shows that for the first time in 14 years, all five Great Lakes are at or above average water levels. Lake Michigan/Huron is up 18″ in the last year.
Source: http://w3.lre.usace.army.mil/hh/GreatLakesWaterLevels/GLWL-CurrentMonth-Feet.pdf
Here is the last twenty years worth of data. The red line is the “normal” line in each lake level plot. The red dashed lines are forecasts.
Source: http://www.glerl.noaa.gov/data/dashboard/GLWLD.html
From a July 07, 2014 Chicago Tribune article:
In January 2013, the average water levels in Lakes Michigan and Huron dipped to 576 feet, the lowest point since modern record-keeping began in 1918.
The all-time high of 582.3 feet was set in October 1986, representing a sizable range of about 6 feet.
The lakes tend to follow yearly cycles, swelling in the spring and summer and shrinking in the fall and winter, but they have never in 95 years of recordings remained below average for so long.
The last two years of relatively heavy winter and spring precipitation, however, have led to this year’s stronger-than-usual seasonal rise, according to Keith Kompoltowicz, chief of watershed hydrology for the Army Corps of Engineers Detroit District.
“We saw a tremendous amount of snow,” Kompoltowicz said of this winter. “We haven’t seen snow like that in a long time.”
In fact, the snowpack around the Michigan basin this year was 30 percent higher than at any time in the past decade. The past two months have also supplied above-average amounts of rain, quenching parched harbors and popular fishing holes like the Lincoln Park Lagoon.
So much for climate change effects, water is back to normal levels for now.
[duplicated Tribune quote removed. .mod]
h/t to WUWT reader cjames
Should that have 3 edits?: “All Great Lakes[ ‘ ] water level[s ARE] at or above normal for first time in 14 years”
Lakes have levels. One lake has a level, or so it would seem. Plus the water levels belong to the Great Lakes, no?
No need to keep this post in the comments. Okay to delete it after consideration by the Mods.
Keep up the great work and excellent articles. Your articles are used by many people, to help to counter the unsupported climate hysteria in the media.
http://iceweb1.cis.ec.gc.ca/Prod20/page3.xhtml – ice went from all time minimum for season in the record back to 1980 to all time maximum in 2013/14.
Every week was above normal http://iceweb1.cis.ec.gc.ca/Prod20/page3.xhtml – with the ice seen still in June on Superior.
Does anyone know what happened to all the federally funded Great Lakes “emergency dredging” projects scheduled for 2014? Did they just go ahead and dredge anyways, even when “emergency erosion control” projects are now more appropriate?
If so, it would make a wonderful example of how “we have to do something before it is too late” global warming monies are wasted.
In regard to the EPA and Corps proposed Waters of the USA Rule and the potential regulatory reach into every nook and ditch in the country….
Let us confront proponents of this rule, and particularly the Corp of Engineers with the following question:
“How much wetland along the shores of the Great Lakes have been affected by your dredging and channeling of the St. Clair River and its proximate cause in lowing the levels of the Great Lakes?”
“Given the level of damage to wetlands in this country the Corps is directly responsible, why should we give you regulatory authority of even greater swaths of public lands, much less private land?”
So if “Climate change is lowering Great Lakes water levels” is climate change also increasing Great Lakes water levels? Climate change also lead to the late ice on the lakes this year. Is there anything climate change (or co2) cannot do?
The all-time high of 582.3 feet was set in October 1986,
representing a sizable range of about 6 feet.
————————————————————————-
Well, maybe not. I went to school in Valparaiso Indiana and learned first hand from the seat of my bicycle what a glacial moraine looks like; it’s very hilly. There is a spot between Chesterton and La Porte where Interstate 80 cuts right through the folded landscape that marks the southern terminus of the Wisconsin Glacier. When the glacier melted, it left behind the monster lake Algonquin that drained down to the level of the Great Lakes that we see today.
After school, I learned that I actually had some skill at riding and racing bicycles. Our team training rides have taken us all over southern Wisconsin, northeastern Illinois, and northwestern Indiana, generally following the margins of the moraine, as that is where the most low-traffic bicycle-friendly roads are, and the hilly terrain is good for training. The better rides push 100 miles in length, and after long hours in the saddle you start to notice things – things like piles of sand and rocks and shells that look just like a lake beach in places like the Palos Heights bike trail in Illinois and alongside the country roads around Dyer, Chesterton, and just north of La Porte in Indiana. Lake Michigan is a good 20 miles north of these locations today.
My Garmin 705 GPS records elevations around 650 ft above sea level when we ride down at Palos, and the current lake level is about 579 ft, so I would say that Lake Michigan has dropped at least 60 or 70 ft since the climate started to warm up at the beginning of the Holocene. I for one am OK with that. As a matter of fact, I want it warmer today, as we just delayed our scheduled 70 mile ride this morning due to the 39F forecast starting temperature, as most of us have yet to dig our winter gear out of our closets and our bodies are still acclimated to summer temperatures and humidity. Cyclocross season doesn’t start for another week, but it already feels like mid November. Argh.
Well, if anybody is in the Chicagoland area, September 28th is the Apple Cider Century in Three Oaks Michigan, and the 100 mile route traditionally includes a stretch along the current Lake Michigan shoreline just north of New Buffalo. The elevation is 692 ft at Three Oaks, so the ride will cross the former shoreline of Lake Algonquin and the second shoreline of the successively smaller Lake Chicago that followed, to reach the modern shore of Lake Michigan. If you pay attention, you might even see the former beaches along the way.
So, can we now say, “Move along; nothing to see here.”?
This brings up something about the polar ice area. When it comes back up to “average”, then it is as if the “record low” never existed. For the physical real world it is a clean slate.
And, being a clean slate, the physical real world future is virginal territory. It might go up, and it might go down – and it certainly will do both.
Get with the program! If the levels are lower it’s proof of global warming; if they are hgigher, also the same. Gosh..must I teach you everything?