Abstract
Ice cover on the Great Lakes plays an important role in regional climate, supports tourism and recreation, and provides ecological habitat. As the climate warms, ice cover in the Great Lakes is expected to decline, which in turn will create more lake effect precipitation, reduce ice cover for recreation, and alter habitat for aquatic species. While it is important to understand the historical ice patterns to better understand past distributions of aquatic species and improve the accuracy of forecasts for future ice cover on the lakes, Great Lakes ice cover data prior to 1973 is scarce, due to the limited routine satellite observations. We used weather station data around the Great Lakes to compile daily air temperature, calculate cumulative freezing degree-days and net melting degree-days from 1897–2023, and develop raster layers estimating ice duration and variability spatially during the historical period from 1897–1960.
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Data availability
The daily air temperature data and the calculated modeled CFDD and NMDD data for 1897–2023 are available as csv files for download from National Centers for Environmental Information version 2.224. The historical ice duration spatial raster layers (mean and CV for each lake at 1.8 km resolution) are available as a geodatabase38.
Code availability
All code can be found in the Github repository https://github.com/kingka21/historical_GL_ice and archived in Zenodo42.
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Acknowledgements
Our project was funded through the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative and the Coregonine Restoration Template. Any use of trade, firm, or product names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the U.S. Government.
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K.B.S.K. created the spatial ice methods and layers, lead writing the manuscript, and made Figs. 3,4, 7, and 8. A.F.M. led, mentored, and managed students for the air temperature and freezing/melting degree days methodology and made Figs. 2, 5, and 6. D.C. and I.P. performed initial air temperature and freezing/melting degree day methods. D.C. made Fig. 1. K.M.A. and C.B. secured funding and provided mentoring for the entire project. All authors contributed to writing and reviewed and edited the entire manuscript.
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King, K., Fujisaki-Manome, A., Brant, C. et al. Reconstructing Great Lakes air temperature and ice dynamics data back to 1897. Sci Data (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-06637-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-06637-1
