March 30, 2023 at 12:03 p.m.
The Lake Where You Live
Betting on the melt
From the look of things it will be a long time before he gets wet.
Conditions on your lake are likely similar to those on mine. Usually by this time the snow has receded significantly.
This year, from mid-February on, it has instead accumulated, most recently with two inches on March 22.
We need warm days to start things moving in the right direction, and more than that we need sunlight. The increasingly direct rays that lead up to and follow the vernal equinox can do a lot of melting. The problem right now is the depth of the snow.
To really do its work the sun needs dark surfaces. That's what absorbs the light's energy and converts the snow and ice to the liquid phase. If you doubt that, look at the roof of your house or garage. Once enough snow melts to expose the edges of the shingles, the water begins to flow down in earnest, and the white blanket shrinks.
But on the lake there's no comparably dark surface to expose, at least not for a while. Pristine snow reflects upwards of 90 percent of the sun's energy back into the air. As long as that's the case, the melting will be slow. And getting rid of two or three feet of snow cover will take time.
Eventually two things will happen. One, the melt will begin to expose the darker-colored lake bottom to the sun. The bottom will absorb heat, melt the ice away from the shoreline, and create strips of open water. That process continues as more lake bottom is exposed.
Number two, the snow will melt away, exposing the ice, which then becomes grainy and slushy as its surface begins to thaw. That comparatively rough surface is much less reflective than pure snow. And now the pace of melting quickens.
Factors that speed the process along, in rough order of importance, are sunny days, radiant heat from the lake bottom warming the water, warm day and night temperatures, strong warm winds, and rainfall.
I don't enter the ice-out prediction contests for the same reason I stopped filling out NCAA basketball tournament brackets years ago: I'm always wrong, and often by a lot. To win the ice-out contest I might as well throw a dart at wall-mounted April and May calendar pages.
Last year I predicted, to a few who would listen, that the ice would last until a week or two into May.
It left the lake on April 30.
This year, who knows? We could continue the cold, snowy (and infuriating) pattern of the last four or five weeks.
Or we could get a long spell of clear skies, with warm winds sweeping up from the southwest.
So others can bet on when that dummy on the Birch Lake ice takes a cold swim. I'll just watch and wait with considerable interest.
Ted Rulseh is a writer, author and lake advocate who lives on Birch Lake in Oneida County. His new book, "Ripple Effects," has been released by UW Press. You can learn about it by visiting his website at https://thelakeguy.net.
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