Meteorologist Mark Torregrossa writes on Michigan Live about the lingering effect of historic ice extent last winter in the Great Lakes and late ice melt this summer due to that extent:
Lakes Superior and Lake Michigan are currently six degrees colder than last year. If the water continues to remain colder than normal, it could have an impact on Michigan’s winter in several ways.
Currently Lake Superior has an average surface water temperature of 47.6 degrees. Last year on this date Lake Superior was at 53.7 degrees. The long-term average water temperature on Lake Superior for October 11 is 51.1 degrees.
So Lake Superior is 6.1 degrees colder than this time last year, and 3.5 degrees colder than normal.
Lake Michigan has an average surface water temperature of 56.0 degrees, while last year at this time it was 62.1 degrees. The long-term average water temperature on Lake Michigan for October 11 is 58.4 degrees.
Lake Michigan is also 6.1 degrees colder than this time last year, and 2.4 degrees colder than average.
Lake Huron is 5 degrees colder than last year, and only 1.5 degrees colder than normal.
This map above shows current surface water temperatures on the Great Lakes. Lake Superior has a large area of water with temperatures in the 40s. (Source: Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory)
He goes on to talk about the effects this might have on winter:
A warmer Lake Superior and Lake Michigan can really have a modifying effect on bitter cold temperatures. For example, in an early season cold outbreak, Green Bay, WI may have a temperature of 20 degrees. Traverse City, on our side of Lake Michigan, may hold in the mid 30s for temperatures. I usually figure there is a 10 to 20 degree warming effect from Lake Michigan, and also Lake Superior.
But if the lake temperatures continue at this colder pace, cold air will have an easier time moving into Michigan.
So the first impact of cold water could be earlier cold temperatures in November and December.
If the lakes continue through winter colder than normal, freezing over of the lakes would happen earlier.
How does this cold fact square up in the face of claims of “hottest ever”? Is the region in for a record cold winter? It sure looks like it may be more likely due to the influence of this massive heat sink.
[headline updated for accuracy – mod]
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If the surface temperature is still cooler, I would guess that the temperature at depth is also cooler, thus there would be less latent heat to hold off the freezing over for any length of time. It would be reasonable to expect that the lakes will freeze over earlier if it is as cold this year as last, and earlier still if the cold comes earlier.
Not so! In fact, the probability is that water at depths below 10 feet has accumulated all the excess heat, rather than leaving it at the surface, and is now approaching 100 degrees F. This makes it feasible to consider tapping that heat to provide municipal heat for all the cities around both Lake Superior and Lake Michigan.
The color graphic should have been in anomaly colors, showing BLUE for divergence from average. If it were warmer than normal, you’d see the anomaly in BRIGHT RED. Gotta get with the program!
It will be a fast cooling lakes.
http://earth.nullschool.net/#2014/10/17/1800Z/wind/isobaric/850hPa/overlay=mean_sea_level_pressure/orthographic=-71.66,53.52,1106
….If it were not for the self-sacrificing efforts of algore the great lakes wld have boiled away by now
I am so glad I wasn’t drinking something right there. Nicely done.
Lake levels in the Great Lakes are all above the long term average (after the AGW scare of low lake levels last year). This is with colder water. If the water temperature had been average, I wonder how much higher the levels would be due to thermal expansion?
http://www.lre.usace.army.mil/Missions/GreatLakesInformation/GreatLakesWaterLevels/WaterLevelForecast/WeeklyGreatLakesWaterLevels.aspx
Obviously, the missing heat from the great lakes is hiding in the deep ocean /sarc
Not mentioned is that below the “massive heat sink” is an ever larger “…gigantic cold tub…”, which is responsible for pushing whatever warm temperatures there are to those levels intermediate between the top and bottom of what scientists refer to as the “interfernal glacisphere”. And that is what is responsible for the Great Lakes being colder than normal with, of course, more ice than normal. Warmth cools and cold warms. Science is the great educator – never forget that.
Is it just weather or climate?
Temperatures are below average. That makes it weather.
I live in the Great Lakes region and fish lakes in the Western Lake Superior area all spring, summer and fall. I can say this news comes as absolutely no shock considering all lakes I frequent in Central and Northen MN were 5-6 degrees cool all year long at surface and depth. so the brutal winter, extreme lenght of ice cover, late wet spring and cool summer somehow kept the water from heating up to thier normal temps. This is amazing considering in the last 4-5 years forecasters have said they are going to heat up, dry up, be filled with more precipitation and never freeze again.
How can that be? The enviro-wackos tell us everything is warming. Dare I say it? Could they be wrong?
article needs to be rewritten, “models predict ice cold winter, with a fifty percent chance the lake will never unfreeze again, we are confident the Great Lakes will freeze solid within five years. The economic consequences of climate change deniers is coming home to roost.”
Now they can get a real grant.
Keep an eye out for any interesting trends in Hudson Bay, the epicenter if the Laurentide ice sheet.
Oh, it’s absolutely the hottest year on record. And since the data doesn’t reflect that, then it’s biased and can be corrected to properly conform to model predictions.
Maybe all that heat is being created by computers running climate models?
I hate to inform you all, because I’ve always been a climate realist, but part of that is accepting the reality that global warming is indeed MAN MADE. Just ask Jones, Hansen and the others who’ve been ‘adjusting’ the records and causing it! Oh, they won’t admit it, but we all know it’s true!
These are just surface temps. Surely the warmer water has sunk to the bottom, and the colder water has risen to the top……because that is just how things work……………………..or at least how the True Believers think they work.
Of course, especially since cold water is denser than warm water…
Must be free all of that globull warming. Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!
Geesh, globull warming is negatively impacting my Engrish.
Must be “from” all of that globull warming…
Somebody tell Chuck Hagel.
Sadly you climate deniers can not grasp the significance of the cooler water temperatures in the Great Lakes. Just as was mentioned in a prior post with respect to leaving a freezer door open, the cooler temperatures that flow into the Great Lakes’ region create a vacuum effect for warmer temperatures to fill the void in the cool weather origination areas. The weather patterns across North America shift and create giant vortices that deposit warm dry air in the southwestern portion of the US. Thus we have record setting drouts. The southwestern air that would normally result in rainfall will now be swept to the southeastern portion of the US and cause intense rainfall and flooding. The central portion of the US is subjected to the swirling effect of the combined vortices which result in localized weather dysfunction. The northeastern and northwestern contiguous portions of the US are sheltered from the extreme climate change due to their cold water currents providing climate stability. The State of Alaska will endure ravaging weather variations due to the planet Venus being in alignment with Uranus. AGW….what a hoax!
Yeah, and with someone leaving the Great Lakes open and letting all that heat escape, you know somewhere there must be a giant compressor working overtime to cool them back down. Thus causing more warming?
And Jupiter aligns with Mars ….
The lakes help moderate temps downwind in the surrounding areas. Expect those areas to be below avg even if weather is otherwise avg. Hopefully the cold region won’t act as an “attractor” to the polar vortex to the north.
1° … 3° … 7° colder than normal.
Who cares … when winter hits, when it’s cold, it’s cold … and a degree or three difference won’t be noticeable. The only thing that matters is the amount of lake effect snow. The U P of Michigan gets a fair amount of that snow. So too does New York, to the lee of Lake Erie & Lake Ontario.
Buffalo (to the lee of Erie) gets close to 200″ (5 meters) of snowfall, a considerable amount for a major urban area. But that’s nothing to what hits the Tug Hill region of New York (to the lee of Ontario). As just one example, Hooker received an extraordinary accumulation of snow in the winter of 1976-1977, with a total accumulation of 466.9 inches – approximately 39 feet (almost 12 meters).
So the quicker the lakes free over, the quicker the lake effect machine shuts down.
That’s freeze over !!
Last Winter, the watersheds of the Great Lakes had a lot of snow, eventually raising all Great Lakes water levels from inches to a foot and-a-half for Michigan and Huron. When the snow and ice melted, all that water was very cold and contributed to the Great Lakes remaining colder through the late Spring and early Summer. Then there was the ice cube effect with ice remaining, recorded in Lake Superior, into July. We also had a cool summer, winds at times from the near Arctic, and much cloud cover and its albedo effect.
Taken together, there was a lot of heat lost from the Great Lakes waters that allowed ice formation; the spigot for added cold water was from watershed melting snow and ice; the ice cube effect, Arctic winds, and summer cloud cover. Now, Great Lakes colder that normal. No brainer.
What will be interesting, to predict what this winter will be like in the Great Lakes region and their watersheds. So far this fall, magnificent weather: clear and dry. Although not like the Spring & Summer sun, the sunshine from this Fall may warm the Great Lakes sufficiently that we will have a mild winter, considerable lake-effect snow, and limited freeze over. I expect that the Great Lakes water levels would then begin a decline as happened after the 1986 record maximum water levels.
As I have followed the Great Lakes’ water temperatures and levels (prior data not as uniform as it is today) for the last 50 years, still I cannot predict one year nor even a season ahead. The very lowest water levels recorded in Lake’s Michigan and Huron were in 1964 and the very highest water levels were in 1986. 22 year separated the two extremes. Nobody, and I mean nobody predicted such lows or highs and there were a lot of smart people looking at this as there is/was a lot of money (shipping tonnage, dredging, recreational, city water supply, etc.) at stake.
For those in the gambling spirit, there is money to be made by someone in the water level/temperature guesstimate, just not me.
The largest fresh-water lake in the western hemisphere has changed its temperature over 6 degrees in a single YEAR. Apparently great annual temperature changes are not impossible in nature. You have to wonder why the planet has not showed the same wild temeprature excursions – as the IPCC predicted it should.
Maybe – just MAYBE – they were all wrong.
those ice breakers they use, just didn’t get out quick enough.
oh the ice sheets in the arctic and great lakes are not forming, everything is getting Warm! “GLOBAL WARMING! GLOBAL WARMING!”. psssst, uh, the ice sheets are forming… ICEBREAKERS!!!
It’s very sad that every little event in the weather has to be reported and politicized. We live in an era of political madness and a strong delusion. “If something is repeated often enough, people will start to believe it.” Adolf Hitler.
Despite the facts that is not quite the actual quote (but a good paraphrase, I’m not trying to be critical) that people have repeated as being an original quote from Hitler so often that many are programmed to believe it actually was, Goebbels is credited with the accurate form of this particular quote. Not saying Hitler never did use some form of it, mind you, or that his earlier words weren’t somehow at least in part inspiration for it.
For Hitler is credited with ‘the big lie’:
…in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.
Mein Kampf, 1925
Also:
Democratic strategy handbook, current.
“If the lakes continue through winter colder than normal, freezing over of the lakes would happen earlier.”
Which shuts down the Lake Effect Snow on Buffalo and Upstate NY, NE Ohio, Pennsylvania. The bare ground can then freeze to greater depth in a severe cold snap that is more likely to happen this winter.