Winter may be shortening in and around the Great Lakes. Credit: NOAA
A deep look at the water in the Great Lakes shows that winters are about 14 days shorter than they were in 1995.
The finding, outlined in a new paper published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, marks the first time that researchers have used subsurface temperature readings to determine how climate change may be affecting seasons in and around the largest bodies of freshwater in the U.S.
“The lakes are changing in ways that we didn’t fully know about until we had done this work,” says NOAA scientist Craig Stow, one of the authors of the study.
Researchers gathered new data from buoys and subsurface water temperature readings from cable-enclosed thermistor strings deployed in Lakes Michigan, Huron and Superior and compared it to five years of air temperatures. They discovered a strong relationship between the data sets, enabling an analysis of lake dynamics beyond what satellite imagery has determined about winters over the last 30 years.
