Lake Katherine: Our Changing Climate
It’s mid-November here around Lake Katherine. For those of us who live up North year round, we have scurried around like squirrels the last month or so putting away summer accessories, getting boats and docks out of the water, raking leaves, cleaning out gutters, and generally preparing for winter, which we expect could come at any time. There have been a few false starts in October with snow that came and stayed a few days, several hard frosts, and even a cold enough stretch that laid down the first ice on open water at bog edges and in marshes.
A week or so back, I took a walk at dusk on South Shore Drive, newly paved but carrying no traffic at that hour. The mercury was in the thirties despite bright sunshine all day. It was a down coat, gloves, and wool hat kind of late afternoon. Fifteen minutes in, I heard a faint rustling overhead as an unseen gust of wind gently rattled the serrated golden leaves of a bigtooth aspen, its full crown in stark contrast to its deciduous neighbors now standing naked. As I first heard the soft clattering, I looked to the sky for a flock of birds flying low overhead winging their way to a resting spot for the night before resuming their autumnal peregrination to wintering grounds. Instead, the sky was empty and my ears guided my eyes to the now dried out and brittle leaves that shake and then rest in unison revealing the pattern of the wind coming in waves as if I was at the ocean’s edge witnessing the incoming swells.
The sun was falling to the southwestern horizon as I reached the end of Miller Lake Road and turned around to head home. Back on South Shore Drive, the recent snow, some still left on the road, had melted on the sun-warmed ebony surface, laying down a thin sheet of water. As if by magic, I witnessed it shapeshifting from fluid to solid and a broken glass pattern appeared, the water molecules tightening up their ranks, the cold air sculpting them into rigid crystals. I tested the fresh frozen coating and caught myself almost falling. Over the course of just minutes an unsuspecting walker might have found themselves on a surface as slippery as a newly groomed skating rink.
Since then, the temperatures have followed the expected pattern of steadily falling stretches followed by a few days above freezing and then a set of days with even lower temperatures with just a day or two of warmth afterwards, this eventually leading us into winter, a season I mark when days and nights stay below 32 degrees and ice forms on the lake and stays. What is certainly not unprecedented, but remains an extremely rare event from a historical perspective, is an upcoming few days when air temperatures will spike into the high 50’s before sinking again. The forecast for the start of deer hunting season on the 18th is for the low 40’s and there isn’t but one day in the coming two weeks that the temperature is expected to stay below freezing for more than twenty-four hours.
The week of November 13-17 is Winter Awareness Week in Wisconsin, which is jointly sponsored by the State of Wisconsin Emergency Management team and the National Weather Service offices that serve Wisconsin. People are encouraged to become more aware of the dangers of winter weather that include heavy snows, blizzards, ice storms, extreme cold and low wind chills. This year, it will be ironic that we will see some of the highest temperatures recorded for these days.
The National Weather Service website provides a cornucopia of information including historical information going back over one hundred years. I took a peek at what the month of November looked like a century back for the Minocqua area. Surprisingly, the weather pattern for the first half of the month was about what we are having here with six days over 50 degrees. The departures from average temperatures (calculated only since 1903) on the warmest days were 9-12 degrees.
Fifty years ago, November was on the cold side with six straight days in the first half of the month that stayed in the single digits, these also a departure of 10-12 degrees from the cumulative average from the previous seventy years. Today, after one hundred twenty years of data collection, shows a monthly average of 36.6 degrees as a maximum, 21.9 degrees as a low, and 29.2 degrees as an average day. Over the last ten years, the average temperature for Minocqua in November is 37 degrees, eight above the average. This is in line with what we are hearing nationally and globally - October was the warmest on record and November looks like it will be as well.
How this will affect Lake Katherine, the surrounding forests and wetlands, and our way of life is all to be played out. Some of our most common trees like aspen and red pine are at the southern edge of their geographic ranges. Increased average temperatures tend to stress species close to the edges of their range, increasing their potential susceptibility to insects and diseases. Reduced days of ice cover on lakes can have significant ecological impacts because ice regulates lake temperature and other factors like how much dissolved oxygen is in the water. Changes to these factors will favor some species of plants and animals and will have negative effects on others.
Wisconsin is home to some of the most forward focused research on climate changes and its effects. The lakes around Madison are among the most closely studied in the world.
There are a number of good websites to look at to better understand how climate variability and overall increasing temperatures are affecting lake environments. A good one to start with is climate.gov.
We hope that wherever you are, you are able to enjoy the time ahead with family and loved ones as we enter the next season of change.
