Reaching a breaking point: How is climate change influencing the timing of ice breakup in lakes across the northern hemisphere?

Abstract

The duration of seasonal winter ice cover has declined in many mid‐ and high‐latitude regions around the world as climate continues to warm. We obtained data on lake ice breakup dates, air temperature, precipitation, and large‐scale climate oscillations for 152 lakes across the northern hemisphere from 1951 to 2014. Ninety‐seven percent of study lakes exhibited earlier ice breakup trends. Forty‐six percent of the variation in ice breakup trends was driven by spring air temperatures and elevation across the northern hemisphere. However, changes in ice breakup have not always been in a gradual or linear pattern. Using the sequential T‐test analysis of regime shifts, we found evidence of abrupt changes in mean ice breakup for 53% of lakes with shift years identified between 1970 and 2002. Concurrently, we found abrupt changes in mean spring and winter air temperatures, winter precipitation, and large‐scale climate oscillations that occurred either the same year or 1 yr prior. Earlier ice breakup and the shortening of the ice season will have consequences for winter heritage, local economies, and lake ecosystems around the world.

Global lake responses to climate change

“…Ice phenology in some regions is changing non linearly ( Fig. 2), with faster rates of lake warming in response to climatic change and phase switches of large scale climate oscillations such as El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) [34][35][36] . Increased greenhouse gas emis sions and warming temperatures have been contributing to shorter ENSO and NAO cycles since the latter half of the twentieth century 37,38 , directly impacting ice break up and freeze dates 33 .…”

Conditions of spatiotemporal variability of the thickness of the ice cover on lakes in the Tatra Mountains

“…In recent years, there has been a steady increase in research on the ice phenology of lakes and reservoirs in the temperate climatic zone (Magnuson et al 2000;Solarski et al 2011;Choiński et al 2015a;Ariano and Brown 2019;Lopez et al 2019;Sharma et al 2019). The studies mainly focused on linking ice regimen patterns with contemporary climate change (Magnuson et al 2000;Duguay et al 2003;Marszelewski and Skowron 2006;Salonen et al 2009;Brown and Duguay 2010;Karetnikov and Naumenko 2011;Pociask-Karteczka and Choiński 2012;Choiński et al 2015a;Leppäranta 2015;Wrzesiński et al 2016;Hewitt et al 2018;Likens 2019;Lopez et al 2019).…”

“…In recent years, there has been a steady increase in research on the ice phenology of lakes and reservoirs in the temperate climatic zone (Magnuson et al 2000;Solarski et al 2011;Choiński et al 2015a;Ariano and Brown 2019;Lopez et al 2019;Sharma et al 2019). The studies mainly focused on linking ice regimen patterns with contemporary climate change (Magnuson et al 2000;Duguay et al 2003;Marszelewski and Skowron 2006;Salonen et al 2009;Brown and Duguay 2010;Karetnikov and Naumenko 2011;Pociask-Karteczka and Choiński 2012;Choiński et al 2015a;Leppäranta 2015;Wrzesiński et al 2016;Hewitt et al 2018;Likens 2019;Lopez et al 2019). The occurrence of ice, and especially of ice cover, has been demonstrated to have a number of impacts on limnic processes, such as: the dynamics of the water mass and its thermal and oxygen conditions (Gao and Stefan 1999;Leppäranta et al 2003;Šporka et al 2006;Granados et al 2020), the available light (Prowse and Stephenson 1986;Leppäranta et al 2003;Kiili et al 2009;Lei et al 2011), gas concentrations (Prowse and Stephenson 1986;Terzhevik et al 2009;Terzhevik et al 2010), and chemical and biochemical processes (Shuter et al 2012).…”

On the use of averaged indicators to assess lakes’ thermal response to changes in climatic conditions

“…In this respect, previous studies using the JAS metric may not adequately represent the ongoing warming dynamics of the lakes. Of course, this is not entirely new to limnologists, who have often claimed that the best indicators are case-specific [39,53], suggesting that the warming process has to be analysed on a seasonal scale [16,28,54] and showing that the trend in the cold season is comparable to the rate of summer warming [55]. However, we stress that it is important to be aware of the possible limitations that are behind global scales analyses made with standardised indicators.…”