Author(s): Jia Wang; Xuezhi Bai; Ayumi Fujisaki-Manome; Haoguo Hu; Dmitry Beletsky
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Keywords: No Keywords
Abstract: This paper describes recent progress made by a team from the NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL) and the University of Michigan (UMich) Cooperative Institute for Limnology and Ecosystems Research (CILER). Over the past six years (since 2007), this team has studied Great Lakes ice and regional climate in response to global climate changes and how to transfer scientific research results into predictions of lake ice on the scales of several days to several months. The Great Lakes are located at the edge of the action centers of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and the nodal points of the action centers of the Pacific-North America (PNA) pattern. Aloft, there exists a strong highly-fluctuating annual south-north displacement of the westerly jet. Great Lakes ice responds linearly to the NAO and nonlinearly (quadratically) to the El Ni~no and South Oscillation (ENSO or Nino3.4). As a result, both NAO and ENSO have impacts on lake ice, but neither of them solely dominates the Great Lakes regional climate and lake ice cover. The combined effects of both NAO and ENSO on lake ice provide high predictability skills using statistical regression models. For the first time, fully-coupled Great Lakes Ice-circulation Models (GLIM) with both dynamics and thermodynamics have been developed at GLERL/CILER to simulate and investigate the lake ice variations on the synoptic, seasonal, interannual, and decadal time scales. The hindcast results were validated using in situ, airborne, and satellite measurements for various periods. The validated GLIM has been used since the 2010-2011 ice season to forecast Great Lakes ice cover concentration, thickness, velocity, and associated air-ice-sea variables for up to five days in advance.
Year: 2014