Friday, April 01, 2011

2011 Ice Out By Easter Update #1


Yes it's that time of year again, time to monitor the ice going off lakes across the state of Minnesocold. As you may know from my previous posts this week ice was off my area lakes by this time last year. What a difference a year makes! A cold Winter combined with a cold March has all MN Lakes locked up as of April 1st this year. Normally ice is off some lakes in the Southern part of the state by now.

The MN DNR has a web page devoted to tracking Ice Out on quite a few lakes spread all over the state. The URL is http://climate.umn.edu/doc/ice_out/ice_out_status_11.htm; if you change the 11 to 10 you get the information collected in 2010 and you can go back all the way to 99. In the 12 years only 2001 and 2008 didn't have some open lakes in MN by April 1st.

The screen capture at the top of this post is of a map the DNR does showing certain selected lakes.

And be sure not to miss the description of how lake ice melts.

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