- Meadville Tribune - 1 day ago“By the time we hit the later summer, it's likely that lake temperatures will ... “But places like Meadville and anywhere near the Great Lakes will have a ... is the chance that lake water levels will not lower as much as last year ...
Potential Record Ice on Lake Superior May Mean a Cool Spring
This is the first year that I can EVER remember that I didn't need Mountaineering skis with skins or snow shoes to get up to Heart lake this time of year (February 2014). Castle Lake is at around 6000 feet in elevation and Heart Lake at least 7000 feet. And Castle Lake should have about 6 feet of ice and snow on it and be frozen over like you see Heart lake is to the left. In other words you should be able to ski or snow shoe across Castle Lake until the end of March like every other year I can remember.www.accuweather.com/en/...news/...frozen-lake.../2343939...Feb 20, 2014 - Depending on who you ask, Lake Superior already has frozen over, Austin stated
AccuWeather. ... "The lake is going to just start warming this year when it will start ... of the Great Lakes are fairly shallow they can recover quickly later in the ... Potential Record Ice on Lake Superior May Mean a Cool Spring
By Kristen Rodman, AccuWeather.com Staff Writer
February 20, 2014; 4:19 AM
NASA satellites captured this image of Lake Superior, Lake Michigan, Lake Huron and Lake Ontario on February 19, 2014.
With the end of winter in sight, the remnants of winter rage on, ushering in frigid Arctic air and dumping record-breaking snow and ice on much of the nation. This season, ice coverage on Lake Superior has exceeded all other measurements since 1994.
"By the long shot this is the most ice we've had on Lake Superior in 20 years," Associate Professor Jay Austin of the Large Lakes Observatory in Duluth, Minn., said.
During a typical winter, 30 to 40 percent of the Great Lakes are covered by ice, according to AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Brett Anderson.
Usually Arctic air swept over the Great Lakes creates lake-effect snow, but modifies the air, making it warmer. This usually makes regions from Ohio through the Northeast a little warmer than it otherwise would be.
However, this winter 80 to 90 percent of the Great Lakes are covered in ice. As of Thursday, Feb. 13, 2014, Lake Superior was classified as 90 percent covered.
"The Arctic air masses don't get warmed up as much because of all the snow and ice," Anderson said. "There has not been much of a thaw so the ice keeps building up."
The last time in recent history the ice coverage was even close to this winter's percentage was the winter of 1993/94. That winter ice coverage was measured at 90.7 percent.
Unlike a pond, the depth of the Great Lakes prevent it from being a completely frozen sheet of ice, but instead the ice atop the lakes can actually move with the wind, according to Austin. Due to the ability of the ice to move around, the thickness of the ice across the lakes vary and therefore researchers do not know how thick the ice is in all portions of the lake.
So, this makes it hard for scientists to define what freezing over entirely means.
Depending on who you ask, Lake Superior already has frozen over, Austin stated. However, with two to three weeks to go until the typical peak of ice coverage in mid-March, the Lakes will only freeze even more.
"The ice will become more robust, we are going to have more ice rather than less over the next three weeks," Austin said.
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Other than the ice jam worries, the ice coverage on the Great Lakes, specifically on Lake Superior, is mounting concerns for the region's climate.
"With all of this ice, all the sunlight that hits the surface of the lake is going to get bounced back out into space, so it's going to take longer to get warmer this spring and summer," Austin said. "The lake is going to just start warming this year when it will start cooling off for next year."
In this Feb. 6, 2014 aerial photo is the ice covered St. Clair River with the Canadian shoreline on the left. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)
This could bring a relatively cool year for the communities surrounding the lake.
However, the silver lining of the massive ice coverage is that perhaps it can prevent lake water levels from lowering like they did just last year.
"With the ice cover, less water gets evaporated so lake levels stay high and help preserve some of the water," Anderson said.
Regardless of the impending impacts of the ice on the region, one thing is for sure, the ice isn't going anywhere, anytime soon.
An impending return of the now-infamous polar vortex for the middle of next week ill send temperatures from the Midwest to the Northeast plummeting 15 to 20 degrees below normal. As it drops down to the James Bay in Canada, it will deliver another blast of arctic air for the area.
"This type of airmass will give the Great Lakes the potential for a new satellite-era ice coverage record," Anderson said.
The winters of 1993 and 1994 had the previous highest since we started monitoring ice coverage with satellites about 30 years ago.
According to AccuWeather.com Long Range Expert Paul Pasetlok, "Because some of the Great Lakes are fairly shallow they can recover quickly later in the spring, so that there may be minimal impact on land area temperatures for most of the summer."
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Potential Record Ice on Lake Superior May Mean a Cool Spring
When they showed pictures of a frozen solid Niagra Falls which they said was very unusual in March I thought of a completely unfrozen Castle Lake at 6000 feet last week (the first time I have ever seen this in March in my life). And how the two things might be interrelated. I have watched the polar vortex keep coming down from the Rockies to the East over and over again throughout this winter. And since this is related to ice melting at the north pole almost completely out during the summer and fall which destabilizes the Polar Vortex it falls off the north pole (this year onto the Rockies and to the East Coast). But last year it did this to Europe, Russia and North Africa. So, who's next next year? China? or who?
Anyway, I can't help but feel the extreme warm winter in the West is related somehow to the Arctic Winter in the East and wonder where all this is going in the future? And somehow the extreme warm winter in the West is somehow also related to the relative drought we have been having in California and other nearby states for several years now.
Very few ski lifts have had enough snow in California to even open up this year and that is very unusual. When I was up at Castle lake the snow pack there was under 10% of normal for this time of year.
This is what Castle Lake and Heart Lake looked like in late February when I was there last week:
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
Great Lakes still frozen later this year!
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