Water

Photo Friday: Ice and snow cover Green Bay

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By Evan KreagerGreat Lakes Echo 
This photograph taken recently from the International Space Station shows the city of Green Bay, Wis. Just north of the city is the ice-covered Green Bay off the west coast of Lake Michigan. The landscape is covered in snow. Because the sun poorly illuminates the area, the entire scene is set in gray. Fields can be seen purely covered in white snow, and forests look dark.

Echo

Kittens, Great Lakes ice and paying for journalism

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Commentary
The local historical society recently hosted a panel discussion of the history of the Lansing (Michigan) State Journal. That’s my local newspaper and I was particularly interested in the event as I had once worked there as an editor. What really caught my interest in a video of the discussion was a longtime State Journal staffer’s explanation of the publication’s increasing use of metrics to measure how news is consumed. She described how a video screen in the newsroom reports and ranks in real time the top 10 stories that people are reading online. Every week reporters get a report of how many people read their stories each day.

Climate

Photo Friday: Ice forms Lake Michigan stringers

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By Evan KreagerGreat Lakes Echo Ice stringers, the lines of ice that can be seen traveling out across these Lake Michigan waters, are formed when strong winds blow ice off a point of land and into a long, connected string. This photograph produced by astronauts on the International Space Station shows Washington Island off the point of Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula and two smaller adjacent islands. They are joined by ice. When this photo was taken on Feb. 22, strong southwesterly winds blew against their ice-covered shores, according to NASA’s Earth Observatory.

Climate

Great Lakes ice cover surpasses 88 percent

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Ice cover on the Great Lakes reached 88 percent this month for the first time in a decade, according to NASA’s Earth Observatory. Since 1973, average ice cover of the lakes has been just more than 50 percent. It has only exceeded 80 percent five times in the past 40 years. This image of the Great Lakes was taken by NASA’s Aqua satellite on February 19, 2014. NASA reported that NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory put ice cover at just over 80 percent.

Wildlife

Month in Review: Icy waters and carp fatigue

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At the end of each month, Current State  check in with Great Lakes commentator and journalist Gary Wilson for updates on environmental stories from around the basin. For this Great Lakes Month in Review, Gary focuses on ice cover and Asian carp fatigue. Wilson last spoke with Current State after the Army Corps’ study on Asian carp in the Great Lakes was released. Wilson says that carp fatigue has set in, meaning that Asian carp reports are in the news so frequently that people tend to tune it out. Great Lakes Month in Review: Ice cover, Asian carp and Federal funding by Great Lakes Echo

Climate

Photo Friday: Ice atop Lake Erie

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When last week’s snowstorm and cold spell made its way through the Great Lakes, nearly 90 percent of Lake Erie froze over, according to the NASA Earth Observatory. The colorized picture above shows ice (pale blue) and snow (blue-green) formed on top of the lake. A report by Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at Wunderground.com, showed that these high levels of ice coverage had not been seen on the Great Lakes since January 1994.