Projecting climate change impacts on ice phenology across Midwestern and Northeastern United States lakes

Kevin Blagrave () and Sapna Sharma ()
Additional contact information
Kevin Blagrave: York University
Sapna Sharma: York University

Climatic Change, 2023, vol. 176, issue 9, No 2, 19 pages

Abstract: Abstract Lakes are sensitive indicators of climate change as freshwater requires temperatures below 0 °C to freeze. Here, we used 34-year records for 74 lakes distributed across the Midwestern and Northeastern United States to ask the following: (i) Which physical factors affect lake ice phenology in the Northern United States?; (ii) Can an empirical statistical modelling approach be used to effectively predict ice phenology across the morphologically diverse lakes of the Northern United States?; and (iii) How much ice is forecasted to be lost in response to climate change? We find that our study lakes require 19 days with air temperatures below 0 °C to freeze, ranging from 4 days for small lakes to 53 days for larger lakes. To thaw, lakes require 22 days with air temperatures above 0 °C, ranging from 8 to 33 days. We find that 64% of the variation in ice-on dates is explained by air temperatures, and the remaining 36% of variation is explained by lake morphology, primarily mean depth. For ice-off dates, 80–90% of the variation is explained by air temperatures. By the end of the century in response to climate change, these lakes may lose 43 days of ice cover, although ranging from 12 days of less ice cover to no ice cover at all. Understanding the drivers of variability in ice phenology for lakes within regions found to be highly sensitive to climate change will promote our understanding of ice cover and ice loss, and also the widespread ecological ramifications associated with ice loss.

Keywords: Climate change; Climate change projections; Ice cover; Ice phenology; Lake morphometry; USA (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10584-023-03596-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:climat:v:176:y:2023:i:9:d:10.1007_s10584-023-03596-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10584

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-023-03596-z

Access Statistics for this article

Climatic Change is currently edited by M. Oppenheimer and G. Yohe

More articles in Climatic Change from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().