GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (Michigan News Source) – Michigan’s not so close neighbor, Alaska, may hold the answers to whether the Great Lakes will freeze this winter according to researchers. 

Researchers at the University of Michigan and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have found a strong correlation between ice temperatures and conditions on the Bering Sea, and other areas of northern Alaska, and the Great Lakes.  

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In the last few years, when the Alaskan seas are warmer, the Great Lakes will be more icy in the winter time, with the inverse findings as well. 

“Since the winter of 1997-1998, we can call this a shift in Great Lakes ice cover,” a research scientist and ice climatologist at NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, Jia Wang said, “The average of the ice cover is lower than before, but variability up and down is larger than before 1998.”

The Great Lakes ice cover has been below its long term average 15 times between the 24 winters between winter of 1997 to last winter.  One winter, between 2013 to 2014, the Great Lakes averaged 93% ice cover, and the ice continued long after winter and into June on Lake Superior.  But another outlier was the winter just two years before, and merely 12% of the Great Lakes were covered in ice. 

“All five lakes have experienced some degree of long-term decrease, but the decrease is only statistically significant in one lake (Superior),” the Environmental Protection Agency said in a report, “Years with much-lower-than-normal ice cover appear to have become more frequent during the past two decades, especially in lakes like Erie and Superior that have a history of freezing almost completely.” 

Fluctuating ice levels on the Great Lakes affects far more than just the shipping industry and environment, it also has an import on Michigan’s weather. 

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“Declining ice cover, or longer periods of the year with open lake water, combined with warmer surface temperatures, will lead to increased lake-effect precipitation in the future. In the near term this may mean increased lake-effect snow, but as air temperatures rise, lake-effect snow will transition to lake-effect rain,” states researchers with the Great Lakes Integrated Sciences and Assessments, or GLISA, an Ann Arbor-based collaboration between the University of Michigan, Michigan State University and NOAA focused on climate change’s impacts and how communities can adapt to them.

Wang projects that the pattern will continue for some time, and plans to use the Bering and Chukchi sea temperatures in his laboratory’s Great Lakes ice cover forecast modeling.  The result of the high atmospheric pressure similar to conditions before 1998 has Wang making a prediction about this winter. 

“So this year, Great Lakes ice cover will be mild, because the North American ridge-trough system will not be intensified,” he said.