Abstract
Lakes are a key geographical feature in Canada and have an impact on the regional climate. In the winter, they are important for recreational activities such as snowmobiling and ice fishing and act as part of an important supply route for northern communities. The ability to accurately report lake ice characteristics such as thickness is vital, however, it is underreported in Canada and there is a lack of lake ice thickness records for temperate latitude areas such as Central Ontario. Here, we evaluate the application of previously developed temperature models and RADARSAT-2 for estimating lake ice thickness in Central Ontario and provide insight into the regions long term ice thickness variability. The ALS Environmental Science Shallow Water Ice Profiler (SWIP) was used for validation of both temperature and radar-based models. Results indicate that the traditional approach that uses temperatures to predict ice thickness during ice growth has low RMSE values of 2.3 cm and correlations of greater than 0.9. For ice decay, similar low RMSE values of 2.1 cm and high correlations of 0.97 were found. Using RADARSAT-2 to estimate ice thickness results in R2 values of 0.6 (p < 0.01) but high RMSE values of 11.7 cm. Uncertainty in the RADARSAT-2 approach may be linked to unexplored questions about scattering mechanisms and the interaction of radar signal with mid-latitude lake ice. The application of optimized temperature models to a long-term temperature record revealed a thinning of ice cover by 0.81 cm per decade.
Highlights
Lakes are an important feature of the Canadian landscape and hold 7% of the world’s freshwater resources [1]
There is a grouping of points when the accumulated freezing degree days (AFDD) are between 481 to 495 ̊C (February 16th to February 26th) where there is a spike in thickness values, this is not captured by the model (Fig 2A)
The original Stefan’s model and the optimized AFDD model were found to accurately estimate ice thickness when compared to the Shallow Water Ice Profiler (SWIP) and manual measurements
Summary
Lakes are an important feature of the Canadian landscape and hold 7% of the world’s freshwater resources [1]. The presence of lakes can have an impact on the surrounding climate, the impact noted on the net radiation balance and latent heat flux [2]. The presence of ice-free lakes in winter months can contribute to lake-effect snow and understanding the impact of lakes on climate is important for climate models [2,3]. Lake ice acts as an important indicator of how regional climate is changing. Lake ice coverage has been connected to recent increases in temperature, with shifts in the date of freeze up by 10.7 days later and 8.8 days earlier for ice off compared to mean dates from a 150 year record [4].
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