Ice in the western Great Lakes

By Scott Bachmeier • 4 February 2018

GOES-16 “Red” Visible (0.64 µm) images, with plots of hourly surface reports [click to play animation]

After several days of cold temperatures, ice coverage in the western half of Lake Superior began to increase — and GOES-16 (GOES-East) “Red” Visible (0.64 µm) images (above) showed the motion of some of this lake ice (which was driven by a combination of surface winds and lake circulations) on 04 February 2018. That morning a number of locations in northern and northeastern Minnesota reported low temperatures in the -20 to -40 ºF range, with -43 ºF at Embarrass (the coldest location in the Lower 48 states).

With an overpass of the Landsat-8 satellite at 1646 UTC, a 30-meter resolution False-color Red-Green-Blue (RGB) image (below) provided a very detailed view of a portion of the Lake Superior ice. NOAA-GLERL analyzed the mean ice concentration of Lake Superior to be at 23.9% ; the Canadian Ice Service analyzed much of the new lake ice to have a concentration of 9/10ths to 10/10ths.

Landsat-8 False-color RGB image [click to enlarge]

Magnified sections of the Landsat-8 RGB image swath are shown below, moving from northeast to southwest.

Landsat-8 False-color RGB image [click to enlarge]

Moving to the south, a closer look at Green Bay in northeastern Wisconsin revealed a few small ice floes drifting from the north end of the bay into Lake Michigan (below).

GOES-16 “Red” Visible (0.64 µm) images, with plots of hourly surface reports [click to play animation]

Categories: GOES-16, Landsat, Red-Green-Blue (RGB) images, Winter weather

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Ice in the western Great Lakes