Ice cover on the Great Lakes plays an important role in regional climate, supports tourism and recreation, and provides ecological habitat. As the climate warms, ice cover in the Great Lakes is expected to decline, which in turn will create more lake effect precipitation, reduce ice cover for recreation, and alter habitat for fishes. Therefore, it is important to understand historical ice patterns to better understand and predict future ice cover on the lakes. However, Great Lakes ice cover data prior to 1973 is scarce, due to the limited routine satellite observations. Our dataset aims to fill this gap by providing historical spatial ice duration layers to be used for modeling species distributions. and ArcGIS Pro ( https://www.esri.com/en-us/arcgis/products/arcgis-pro/overview), QGIS ( https://qgis.org/) or other spatial data software will be required to view this dataset.
King, K., Fujisaki-Manome, A., Brant, C., Cohn, D., Peng, I., Alofs, K., Reconstructing Great Lakes air temperature and ice dynamics data back to 1897. Under Review
This collection includes raster layers (as a geodatabase) with ice metrics for each of the Great Lakes representing the historical time period of 1898-1960. One metric is spatial mean ice duration (the number of days per year when the lake was frozen) and the other is coefficient of variation of ice duration (variability across years).
