Abstract
Winter snowfall, particularly lake-contributed snowfall, has a significant impact on the society and environment in the Great Lakes regions including transportation, tourism, agriculture, and ecosystem. Understanding the inter-annual variability of snowfall will provide sound basis for local community safety management and reduce its environmental impacts on agriculture and ecosystems. This study attempts to understand the trend and inter-annual variability in snowfall in the Lower Peninsula of Michigan (LPM) using statistical analysis based on snowfall measurements from eight weather stations. Our study demonstrates that snowfall has significantly increased from 1932 to 2015. Correlation analysis suggests that regional average air temperatures have a strong negative relationship with snowfall in the LPM. On average, approximately 27% of inter-annual variability in snowfall can be explained by regional average air temperatures. ENSO events are also negatively related to snowfall in the LPM and can explain ~8% of inter-annual variability. The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) does not have strong influence on snowfall. Composite analysis demonstrates that on an annual basis, more snowfall occurs during the years with higher maximum ice cover (MIC) than during the years with lower MIC in Lake Michigan. Higher MIC is often associated with lower air temperatures which are negatively related to snowfall. This study could provide insight on future snow related climate model improvement and weather forecasting.
Highlights
Winter snowfall, lake-contributed snowfall, has a significant impact on the society and environment in the Great Lakes regions including transportation, tourism, agriculture, and ecosystem (Norton and Bolsenga, 1993; Schmidlan, 1993)
The Mann-Kendall test is used to investigate the trend in annual total snowfall in the eight stations
Our results indicate that snowfall has generally increased in the eight stations used in this study in the Lower Peninsula of Michigan (LPM) during the period of 1932–2015 and the trend is statistically significant at the 95% confidence level in seven of the eight stations
Summary
Lake-contributed snowfall, has a significant impact on the society and environment in the Great Lakes regions including transportation, tourism, agriculture, and ecosystem (Norton and Bolsenga, 1993; Schmidlan, 1993). Clark et al (2016) investigated the spatiotemporal trends in annual total snowfall in the Lake Michigan region and found no changes during the period of 1950–2013 based on station measurements. They found an increase in the fraction of snowfall that occurs from December to February. We will investigate the trends and inter-annual variability of seasonal snowfall in the LPM and their relationships with air temperature, ENSO, and NAO Understanding of such statistical relationships will help future model development related to the mechanism of snowfall and improve prediction of snowfall intensity and distribution. This dataset has been used in Meng and Ma (2021)
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