Ice on the River



I have lived next to the Saint Clair River in Michigan for the last 27 years and I have been fascinated by the recent changes in water levels. This year, the water level here in town is only about a foot below the boardwalk. I have mentioned this in a previous blog post, but this level has alarmed me since for the previous 25 years, and until last year, the water level of the river was several feet lower. Not just inches lower, several feet lower.

I started wondering what causes this fluctuation (aside from the larger concern of global warming) and being a “slightly informed” geology junkie, I jumped on a couple of websites to explore this phenomenon. One large factor that affects the water level in the lakes is apparently how much ice forms on the lakes in the winter, which cuts down on natural evaporation. This, along with precipitation and run-off from land, is one of the major contributing factors to the water level.

I decided to peruse the NOAA website (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and stumbled on some interesting facts and charts. One set of tables shows the percentage of ice coverage per year for all the Great Lakes combined, even though the levels vary by different amounts depending on the lake, taking Lakes Michigan and Lake Huron as a combined total because they are linked at the Straits of Mackinac and are basically one body of water.

According to NOAA, the average ice cover over a span of about the last 50 years is about 53.3 percent measuring from 1975 to the present. It is surprising how much the ice coverage fluctuates. According to these charts, the highest ice coverage on the lakes has occurred in 1979, 1994, 2003, 2014 and 2019. The lowest percentage of coverage, or the warmest years occurred in 1983, 1998, 2002, 2012 and 2017. An interesting fact about Lake Ontario is it generally has less ice coverage than the other lakes because it’s deeper in relation to its surface area, and therefore has more heat storage capability.

On the US Army Corps of Engineers website, they report a monthly water level prediction for the lakes depending on current conditions and various models. Water level data on the lakes is received through a series of water level gages on each lake and they are monitored by several organizations including the US Army Corps of Engineers, NOAA, National Ocean Services Canada, and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

According to the Army Corps of Engineer’s website, most of the lakes are predicted to lose a few inches, except Superior, which will supposedly remain at about the same level since it has received about the yearly average amount of rainfall recently. This comes as a relief to me because of the startling water level in town now, and south of here at Marine City and Algonac, Michigan where there has been property damage due to the high water levels, although on the other hand, they are talking about reductions only in amounts like two or three inches.

In any case, I’ll be watching the ice floes on the river this coming winter with interest. More ice will possibly mean these water levels may persist for some time.

If you are not an earth-science junkie and don’t find weather and natural processes interesting, I apologize for boring you, but if you find this stuff interesting, you may enjoy searching NOAA’s website for interesting facts about the region in which you live.

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Comments

  1. M.M. AndersonAugust 5, 2020 at 3:07 PM

    Quite interesting. I do wonder how Climate Change will factor into it all though. I guess we'll see soon enough.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Mary BedyAugust 5, 2020 at 3:17 PM

      I do too, Linda. The tables I looked at didn't go back that far, so it's hard to say from that what the trend is.

      Delete

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