Comment on tc-2022-232

Abstract

Lake ice melting and breakup form a fast, nonlinear process with important mechanical, chemical, and biological consequences. The process is difficult to study in the field due to safety issues, and therefore relatively little is known about its details. In the present work, ice monitoring was based on foot, hydrocopter, and boat to get a full time-series of the evolution of ice structure and geochemical properties through the melting period. The field observations were made in Lake Pääjärvi during the ice decay periods in 2018 and 2022. In 2022, the maximum thickness of ice was 55 cm with 60 % snow-ice, and based on the data and heat budget analysis, the ice melted by 33 cm from the surface and 22 cm from the bottom while porosity increased to 40–50 % at breakup. In 2018, the snow-ice layer was small and bottom and internal melting dominated during the decay. Due to global warming, the ice breakup date became earlier. The mean melting rates were 1.31 cm d–1 in 2022 and 1.55 cm d–1 in 2018. In 2022 the electrical conductivity (EC) in ice was 11.4±5.79 S cm–1, one order of magnitude lower than in the lake water, and ice pH was 6.44±0.28, lower by 0.4 than in water. pH and EC of ice and lake water decreased along the ice decay except slight increases in ice due to flushing by lake water. Chlorophyll a was less than 0.5 g L–1 in porous ice, approximately one-third of that in the lake water. These results are important for further development of numerical models and understanding the process of ice decay with consequences to lake ecology and to safety of ice cover for human activities.