Corky Boyd writes:
The latest NATICE graphics show Lake Erie totally covered with 9/10+ ice, Lakes Superior and Huron are nearly totally covered with 9/10+ and Ontario about 80% covered with 7/10+. It is likely Superior and Huron will join Erie with total coverage of 9/10+ in today or tomorrow’s report.
It is possible Ontario could do the same as it is experiencing near or sub-zero temperatures tonight.
The NATICE daily reports are posted about 5:00pm EST. Link is here:
http://www.natice.noaa.gov/products/great_lakes.html
If you have trouble pulling up the ice charts, here are direct links to the West and East areas for Feb. 18:
http://www.natice.noaa.gov/pub/special/great_lakes/2015/charts/composite_east/el150218color.jpg
http://www.natice.noaa.gov/pub/special/great_lakes/2015/charts/composite_west/wl150218color.jpg
It is an unusual event for 3 of the lakes to freeze over, which only happens once every 6 to 8 years. Four or more freezing is a most unusual event.
[We’ll have further reports on WUWT as we know more – Anthony]
Grand Haven Mi webcam and more
http://surfgrandhaven.com/cms/
Current Conditions
Temperature 3deg;F
Humidity 86%
Sunrise 7:37. Very cold, windy and lake-effect snow which is the same forecast as Wednesday. Snow will accumulate 2-4 inches that will bring our snow total pretty close to a 100 inches this season. High 11. Low 4. Winds northwest 20-30 mph. Sunset 6:22 pm.
Just an engineer – You asked if the Chesapeake Bay is freezing. It is. See, for example, https://twitter.com/BobRyanCCM/status/567814077259722752 and https://twitter.com/RogerAPielkeSr/status/568172087623286784
How come when we have a few degrees above average it is called an end-of-the-world event brought on by man-made CO2 emissions, shown on all MSM around the world, but when it’s 20 C below average we don’t hear one byte of news, or at best it is blamed on global warming?
If such record cold anomalies can be blamed on global warming, why aren’t warm anomalies blamed on global cooling?
Just sayin’.
Pete Ross
Have a guess which worldview/interpretation is more likely to get the grant dollars rolling in.
I know you know. You know I know.
How can we get the tax-payers, and voters, to understand?
Auto
For those that don’t know, all the Great Lakes data is found at a WUWT page in the ‘Reference Pages’ drop down menu: scroll to ‘Sea Ice Page’ where there are three options, one of which is Great Lakes Ice Page.
It’s noticeable that icing has accelerated very rapidly the past week…….
First time since 1980 that three years in a row are above normal fo rhtis week:
http://ice-glaces.ec.gc.ca/prods/CVCHDCTGL/20150216180000_CVCHDCTGL_0008124142.gif
John M Reynolds
Exactly. This site.. http://www.ec.gc.ca/glaces-ice/?lang=En is where that graph came from. Great site.
Warmest ice ever.
It’s unprecedented extreme weather.
For those who like the weather in BC, which is a fine place to live, or Hawaii, which I’ve heard is a fine place to live (if humid and expensive), right here on the coastal plane of Southern California is fantastic. And, since the weather here varies so little, weather = climate.
Someone has to say it, so here it is: near record ice covering of the Great Lakes is further definitive proof of global warming.
Exactly. What we are seeing in North America is the result of Arctic amplification (Arctic warming at a faster rate than mid-latitudes), causing the Jet Stream to take extreme paths. Parts of the Arctic and other parts of the Northern hemisphere are seeing record warmth, while eastern North America experiences record cold. Evidence is mounting that this a direct result of AGW, with severe economic consequences (ask folks in Boston).
There is nothing extreme about the Jet Stream path. The rest of your statement is equally false.
Barry; Its not a warming Arctic, take a reality check, its happening world wide(northern hemisphere).
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/istanbul-hit-by-siberian-storm-forces-air-canada-flight-to-reroute-1.2961362
http://in.reuters.com/news/picture/istanbul-snowstorm-grounds-planes-shuts?articleId=INKBN0LM0R820150218&slide=1
Barry when there is snow on palm trees you have a problem and its not AGW. By the way, how may times has it snowed in Saudi Arabia in the last 3-4 months? Why don’t you look that up and get back to us , Also add Morocco,Tunis, Algeria just for kicks.
michael
Barry’s kind of mendacious pronouncement is getting beyond old and now is no more than cold blooded fraud.
It doesn’t matter if he believes the crap he is spewing or not.
Nothing about any of our current or recent weather represents any evidence AGW.
Barry’s presumption of a relationship is not evidence of anything but his own naive susceptibility to believing in a the boogeyman CO2.
Barry where are any scientific measurements located that connect CO2 emissions/AGW to any weather at all?
Various lying bozos talking about it in modeling conjecture laced reports which refer to their baseless speculation as “findings” is not scientific evidence of CO2 causing anything.
Regardless of any Peer Review that likes the pitch.
Grow up.
[Please do not insult clowns (bozo’s) on this site by comparing them to climate scientists. We expect an apology to all of the other bozo’s worldwide who are doing good work for the public. .mod]
http://smithsonianscience.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/lores.jpg
The severe economic consequences will come as a result of the EPA’s virtual outlawing of the use of coal and the other idiot governmental actions involved in the needless war on carbon. When your electric bill skyrockets or you flick the switch and your lights or funace don’t go on because your wind or solar power is not reliable, then perhaps you will get real.
What part of the northern hemisphere is seeing record warmth?
Whoops Barry, we both forgot to say “sarc off/”
You will have to excuse Barry as he does not know how to use the SARC tag.
A couple questions Barry. Shouldn’t we also see amplification in the Antarctic? And if not, why not? And, why do you mention amplification in “parts” of the Arctic? Why would the amplification not be uniform? The temperature is predicted to be -34 degrees Fahrenheit tomorrow in Yellowknife, Canada.
The cold is caused by the Jet Stream changing path? Well, that could be true. But was the Jet Stream move caused by AGW, or does the Jet Stream move naturally? Maybe the Jet Stream shifted the other way around 30 years ago, causing warming that was then misinterpreted as AGW? You see, the IPCC report and the computer models all operate on the basis that global average surface temperature is driven by forcings. But a Jet Stream change is not a forcing (you can check that by looking in the IPCC report forcings table and its mapping to temperature), yet it can change the temperature of a significant region, which then feeds into the global average. So a Jet Stream change which causes regional warming therefore also causes GW. This GW is then easily misinterpreted as AGW simply because the IPCC and the models have to find [invent] a forcing somewhere to explain it.
Barry: “Evidence is mounting that this a direct result of AGW”.
Links? No, didn’t think so. Trolling good tonight? Thanks for stopping by to regurgitate the mindless drivel you’ve been programmed and indoctrinated with, though. Appreciate it.
The Great Lakes froze over in the 70s and 80s because of global warming. They didn’t freeze much in the 90s and 2000s because of global warming. And now the Great Lakes are starting another freeze cycle, again due to global warming. Apparently AGW works in mysterious ways.
Barry,
what, exactly, would be sufficient for you to cease to cling to your belief in AGW?
Kelvin vaughan
Here in uk we’re having a very warm feb. Our atlantic gulf stream has been keeping us very warm for several years now which has given us different fish in the sea and caused some of our sea birds problems in finding their favourite food.
Its supposed to be going into a cold phase – seemingly slowly.
Love sarcastic comments from the mods.
Enjoy some photos of Niagra Falls freezing.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/frozen-falls/ss-BBhIHb9
The Great Lakes about to freeze over. Is there anything globull warming can’t do?
yes: die
You could try a Tiljander graph through the heart.;)
Meanwhile, the arctic ice is tracking the 2006/2011 record low ice years. So we know where the cold SHOULD be…
tramamadore,
What is the CORRECT ice extent for the Artic and when was the last time it existed? Please provide a documented reference for what the CORRECT amount of ice in the Artic SHOULD be …
trafamadore
February 19, 2015 at 9:21 am
“Meanwhile, the arctic ice is tracking the 2006/2011 record low ice years. ”
Help me there. Doesn’t the record low appear in late NH summer? Isn’t it winter now? You warmists pretend to be worried about the NH ice extent in February now? What kind of clowns are you?
Troubling, isn’t it? The higher the Arctic sea ice in March-April at maximum, the less heat is lost into space in Jan-Feb_March, the more heat is retained in the ocean water into the summer melt season of May-Jun-July, and the lower the sea ice extent is at the September minimum. Which increases heat loss from the Arctic Ocean in Sept-Oct-Nov which causes more Arctic Sea Ice to grow in Oct-Nov-Dec, …
Tracking the 2006/2011 record low ice years? It’s also tracking the 2013/2014 record recovery years.
It’s because we are in the part of the natural cycle that we were last in 30+ years ago(from the 1950’s-70’s) when we had slight global cooling.
My analog years for these past 2 Winters have been 76/77 last Winter and 77/78 this one.
Both Winters were bitterly cold and snowy in the Midwest/East and featured a severe drought in California.
Using this method is not always reliable to predict Winter weather but at least it yields .increasing odds based on past weather/climate compared to where we are now. Joe B has been doing the same thing for years. I believe 77/78 was one of his favored analog years for this Winter too.
The pattern up until recently was matching up well, except shifted east of what occurred in 77/78, so the East Coast saw the brunt of the cold/snow. The very warm dry weather along the West Coast also shifted into the Plains.
We are seeing the main features retrograde right now, which has shifted the cold/snow into the Midwest
This will eventually allow most of the country to warm up as mild Pacific origin air floods the country will more of a zonal flow…………in week 2, as an upper high builds in the Southeast.
Cold Arctic air masses will still have a chance to drop into the northern tier of states for a little while.
The frozen lakes again this year has been compliments of a polar vortex type, cutoff upper level low at times. In those Winters mentioned above, we had numerous visits from this feature. This does not happen every Winter but in some Winters, will happen many times because of the overall pattern.
Interesting that, like last Winter, we are not seeing extremely negative values of the Arctic Oscillation(-AO) as a powerful ridge/upper level high in the Northeast Pacific/West Coast of North America is the source of our Arctic cold(with the down stream upper level trough/plolar vortex type low).
vs a blocking Green land high that causes the -AO and was featured in our cold Winters of 2009/10, then again in 2010/11. Europe often gets in on the extreme cold/snow with the -AO.
2011/12 was the exception, being very mild and of course was followed up by the drought/heat in the US during the SUmmer of 2012.
So you can see that even when we have a regional climate cycle that is favorable for cold/snowy weather that persists for a couple of decades, there will be weather that is just the opposite in some years.
Just like the 80’s/90’s featured very mild Winters but 95/96 and 2002/3 were exceptionally cold(if I remember correctly).
You can view all the weather maps for previous time frames here:
http://www.hpc.ncep.noaa.gov/ncepreanal/
Forgot to mention, potentially the most significant aspect to the pattern change shaping up in week 2……….with the main large scale features retrograding in the US.
The big upper level ridge along the West Coast is gone and replaced by a strong Pacific jet stream which will bring several opportunities for needed rain/snow to various places in the West, most of which will be very welcome.
This is in the week 2 part of the forecast.
As someone who comes from Southern Ontario’s “snow belt”, I can tell you that people will actually be celebrating, as the open waters of Lake Huron (and its large Georgian Bay) create massive snow squalls when combined with west and south-west winds.
Now it will just be snow and frigidity.
Ice fishing Erie a couple miles out from the south shore (took an ice taxi) back in the early 70s, when it was warmer and the lake was open, a south wind came up and took a very large section of our ice out toward Canada. Now, the rule was that the Coast Guard would send a helicopter for you but just you, not your equipment. So, we had to sprint for shore before the break in the ice became too large to step or jump over. We were lucky that day and the piece of ice that broke off and headed north was very large and moving slowly and we were able to step over the break and reach shore. But then it was warmer back then. No such problems ice fishing Erie recently, as long as you don’t freeze to death.
The [Great] Lakes are infected by ice-nine. In a deplorably warming world there is no other rational explanation to record ice cover. It must have made its way there from as far as the Southern Ocean.
In a dangerously warming world, these things become less and less frequent and eventually, extraordinarily rare.
However, natural cycles can still dominate and over ride greenhouse gas warming, especially on a regional basis. This is especially so if the greenhouse gas warming is not as powerful as expected, which allows the natural cycles to dominate, like they did in the 1970’s for instance………which is what I think is happening.
Clearly, during the past 2 years, the Midwest and East of the US has had some of the most extreme cold/snowy anomalies in Winter as well as some unusually cool Summer weather. Last Summer for instance, here in Indiana, we had our coolest July in history.
I write articles for our local paper on climate change/global warming. This type of weather makes me look good to some people but if I was living in California and doing the same thing, it would make me look bad to the same group which has a hard time separating weather and climate.
All the ice in the Great Lakes the past 2 Winters is both weather and climate.
Weather is short term. 2 Winters in a row still don’t make it climate but then, it is actually part of the climate.
Climate, is just weather averaged over decades, along with the many extreme fluctuations that happen during those decades/period .
Climate has cycles, this one around a 30 year natural cycle when the weather during that period will feature conditions that differ significantly from the average, more often and in one direction. Those same conditions will often be reversed with anomalies that are the exact opposite during the flip side of the climate cycle.
So much Ice in the Great Lakes for 2 Winters in a row, to me just signals that our natural cycles, especially on a regional scale are still more powerful than global, greenhouse gas warming.
Global temperatures currently are a bit warmer today than they were in the 1970’s for instance but the regional weather in the Great Lakes can still revert back to the 1970’s brand of cold/snow/ice without much effect, if any from the slight global warming.
“So much Ice in the Great Lakes for 2 Winters in a row, to me just signals that our natural cycles, especially on a regional scale are still more powerful than global, greenhouse gas warming.” And all this time I thought GHG warming IS natural and without it we would have never left the ice age. Unless you are referring to AGW?
So, Mike, as you know all this, the climate scientists must also know it right? And obviously they didn’t know it 20 years ago because the model runs all do not predict it, right? So you surely agree that we should now dump all these obsolete models and replace them with better ones, right? In other words, all current predictions of global warming up to the year 2100 are junk as well, right?
BUT, if the models are junk, and the models are the representation of the CO2AGW theory, is the theory then not also junk, and must be replaced by YOUR newer, better theory?
Ironwood, Michigan on the south shore of Lake Superior…currently -6 F and season snow total to date 162 inches. Might be above zero tomorrow.
“So, Mike, as you know all this, the climate scientists must also know it right” “So you surely agree that we should now dump all these obsolete models and replace them with better ones, right?”
I’ve been an operational meteorologist for 33 years, a profession with a higher % of skeptics than any other. We are atmospheric scientists too and its the same atmosphere and physical laws and college classes that our climate scientists look at.
What makes us so different?
As a meteorologist, I will give you my subjective meteorological view.
One thing is that climate is their area of expertise. This of course is why the world follows their views regarding global warming and climate change.
But what is the climate, other than weather that occurs over a long period of time?
You can’t completely understand the climate without also understanding the weather which makes the climate what it is. If you understand weather completely, that does not mean that you are an expert on what the effect of increasing CO2 is…….which is supposed to be in the realm of a climate scientists expertise.
In the 1990’s, I believed almost everything I read about the effect of increasing CO2 to the temperature of our atmosphere if it came from a climate scientist. However, I’ve had the privilege to observe and analyze the global atmosphere daily for decades and look back at it from previous decades. My observations don’t match with what I used to believe that is still coming from many climate scientists.
The fact is, there is a disconnect between the actual atmosphere that meteorologists follow closer than any other scientists and the projected conditions of that atmosphere from global climate models that climate scientists use.
Climate scientists have a better understanding than me about all the mathematical equations to represent the physical laws of our atmosphere. I use weather models all day long(climate models use different equations and are much different) and have constant reality checks that require reconciliation between the models and what is actually happening.
A climate scientist at 25 years old, making his first 50 year climate projection based on the latest climate model output, will be an old man before there is a complete assessment of how well that particular projection did in the later periods.
This is an extreme example and they would make changes well before then. However, humans have this cognitive bias thing. Once you are convinced that you are right about something, it takes more information, by several orders of magnitude sometimes, to convince you that change your view.
Especially, if your belief is protected or sheltered from forced reconciliation with reality, like the nature of long term climate projections are for instance.
Climate, by definition is a long period of time(of the weather). The longer the projection(forecast) the less immediate the need to make changes.
If a Winter storm headed for Indiana on Saturday has changed its track, I better get the update out immediately or the forecast is a bust.
If it’s coming in a week from Saturday, and suddenly the models change the track or an outlier model does, I may wait for a couple more model runs to have more confidence in saying something that changes/contradicts what I said yesterday and what I was sure of at that time.
When climate scientists are convinced of their models that project to the end of this century, the urgency to adjust the projections does not exist. If the end date for the projection had been 2015, you would have seen adjustments long ago. The projection and reality must meet at the end point.
If the end point is the year 2050 or even 2100, what’s the rush? It’s still just 2015 and there are all sorts of things that could be temporarily slowing down the warming.
Seriously. If you became convinced in the 1980’s/90’s that most of the warming was from increasing CO2 and programmed climate models based on this, then why would you not justify the warming haitus with thinking like that?
The only way to look more silly than waiting too long to adjust/update a projection/forecast if you are a meteorologist or climate scientist is to make the adjustment/update too quickly and then be wrong because your original projection/forecast was correct.
Looking out my bedroom window, I can confirm that the western end of Lake Ontario, including Burlington Bay, is completely frozen over
http://i1003.photobucket.com/albums/af152/Rubemjr/DSC01918.jpg
Out for my morning Mai Tai…..what’s all the freezing hubbub about?
damnifiknow… just another nice day here in SoCal as well…
Cheers1
lots of interesting stuff on the Canadian government ice page here, and not just the Great Lakes
http://www.ec.gc.ca/glaces-ice/default.asp?lang=En
Can someone please explain the notation used on this map? I don’t know what 7/10 or 9/10+ means.
Area.
The color coding is in tenths, so 7/10 means 70% of that region is ice covered, 9+/10 means more than 90% etc.. The “egg code” is a little more esoteric, and I don’t find it particularly helpful. It seems to be more for multi-year sea ice than lake ice, but I don’t understand it fully.
Thanks for the egg code name and link. I’ve been reading this whole post looking for an explanation. Now I don’t have time to read it this AM.
OK. Sincere thx for your help. I now see that these egg codes were designed for characterizing sea ice and glaciers. Let’s hope they don’t become generally applicable to the great lakes.
You’re welcome.
I don’t think being applied to lake ice is necessarily a problem. There is some underlying information that might be of interest. For example, in the figure at the head of the post the egg codes for regions labeled C and D show that both regions are 100% ice-covered, but regions C have more “thick” ice than regions D.
That’s a level of granularity that I personally don’t find particularly enlightening, but some might find that information useful.
Since the egg codes for the Lakes generally have only two numbers per line rather than three, and since it’s not at all clear to me what they mean by age of ice, I think it would be helpful if the natice site had an explanation specific to the Great Lakes rather than having a link to a description that mainly describes sea ice.
its a nice day here in maine, finally a warm 22 deg day and a night that was above 0f.
course its snowing pretty hard right now.
iirc so far this february I’ve only have 4 nights that were above the 0 to 2 F mark (I have slight window leakage so the temps could be 2 deg colder than what thermometer says) and most were anywheres from 0 to 25 below F.
many -5f nights which are not too bad but we always had winds of 25 or so mph so the wind chills this month were certainly very odd.
This is a good link if you want to watch this historical event. Great Lake’s total ice cover is currently 85.4%.
http://www.glerl.noaa.gov/data/ice/
http://coastwatch.glerl.noaa.gov/glsea/cur/glsea_cur.png
The warmists are still appealing to ‘climate change’ from AGW as the cause of high latitude cooling both poles.
Has anyone heard the warmist explanation as to why there is now the highest sea ice in recorded history (all months of the year) in the Antarctic (note the increase in sea in the Antarctic started in 2012 and coincided with a recovery in sea ice in the Arctic).
If there is record sea ice in the Arctic will the UN sponsor a global celebration, ring the bells? Mission accomplished, global warming has been conquered.
It will be a record of all time. Next week, still arctic air.
I fear that we will continue to hear ludicrous claims of CAGW despite the likelihood that the Great Lakes are all set to freeze over. And, that we won’t stop hearing ludicrous claims of CAGW until hell freezes over.
CAGW causes Hell to freeze over, too.
http://www.planetcalypsoforum.com/gallery/files/4/4/3/7/hell-michigan.jpg
Alan, I hate to say it but the green location sign you’re showing for ‘Hell’ shows it freezing under, not over. That is not proof that hell has frozen over.
🙂
Well played, both.
Steve Oregon February 19, 2015 at 9:47 am
[Please do not insult clowns (bozo’s) on this site by comparing them to climate scientists. We expect an apology to all of the other bozo’s worldwide who are doing good work for the public. .mod]
My sincere apologies to bozos everywhere.
I recall reading that the Great Lakes were significantly colder than usual after last winter (3 degrees, I think), and that this additional mass of cold water could impact the coming (2014-2015) winter, making it colder in the northeast & east coast than it normally would have been.
If that is indeed the case, might we be in store for a repeating cycle?