Shorter ice cover on lakes indicate an alarming trend | News

Madison (WKOW) – The lakes in the Madison area set records year after year, but experts say that they are not the ones they cannot celebrate.

The state climatology office reports on the shortest duration that the lakes frozen is 21 days. This happened in the 2001-2002 season. The second shortest duration, which, depending on the 2023-2024 season, was just 44 days of ice lid. Although the numbers for 2024-2025 are not final, Paul Dearlove with Clean Lakes Alliance says that we already go beyond this number.

“Usually we are closer to an ice cover worth three months. And that is exactly what the trends show us that in the past 160 years of ICE records for Lake Mendota, especially over a month, we have lost ice lids, so that is culturally,” said Dearlove.

Dearlove is the deputy director and Chief Science Officer of Clean Lakes Alliance. He says that the shorter the freezing over the duration, the less time people have to enjoy leisure activities. This is obvious, but he says that the serious effects that have a short freezing over the duration of the overall quality of the lakes may not be obvious.

“We also see a change in everything from phenology, hence the timing of different animals and organisms in the lakes and what happens to spawn, how different organisms interact. They are all based on the change in the seasons and what you can expect in terms of weather and temperature, and this creates this ripple effects that go through the entire ecosystem,” said Lieben.

He says that the earlier the ice ends, the earlier we see more algae growth. Algae are food for zooplankton in the lakes, but when the algae starts and ends when the zooplankton becomes active, you have no food for eating.

“Then the zooplankton means less food for eating, which means less food for our fish species. Therefore it has this entire cascade effect, where only because the ice leaves the lakes earlier and the lakes warm, have these biological effects,” he said.

He said it was interesting to compare annual data, but it is important to understand the long -term trends.

“The climate will be long -term, global, very regional and long -term trends. The weather will be this variation, which you will receive within one season or year to year,” he said.

He says we could have this 90 days of ice cover next year that can be expected, but he says that it would not eliminate the fact that the trends on climate change show.

Dearlove says that you can first adjust your management approach. He says that warming up like the one we experienced in February and March means that we get rainstorms.

“This means that rain falls on frozen soil surfaces, and this rain will simply run off the landscape, and everything it can absorb because it does not infiltrate in the ground and will bring all the material into our lakes,” said Dearlove. “So we have to approach the management differently. How can we manage our water sheath so that we prevent this conveyor belt made of phosphorus and soil and everything else that can move into our lakes with this drainage water.”

He says that you can build a rain garden in your garden, create space for local plants in your lawn and find places in your garden where you can help with the direction of rainwater when it was washed by the roofs or ascents.