April 14, 2024: South End

I haven’t had coverage of the south end of the lake lately, so I was very glad to get these pictures from Pete Tessier. They were taken yesterday.

You can click on them to see them full size, without the tags.

Haze makes it hard to tell the difference between land and open water, so take a closer look at the open water in Four Mile Bay.

Everything else looks ice-covered, but that ice is covered in cracks and pressure ridges. Because the Big Traverse is so open, wind will play a big role in how soon it clears. Thanks, Pete!

I’ve been hoping for a clear satellite image to get a sense of how strong the ice is, but we’ll have to make do with this rather cloudy shot from Thursday the 11th of April:

In this false-colour image, strong ice shows as pale blue, and there’s very little of that to be seen. The darkest blues may represent candled ice. Remember, this was three days ago, and it’s been very warm.

NASA’s Aqua satellite did get a slightly less cloudy image on Friday.

You cannot zoom in on this one. The MODIS images are not high-resolution.

 

 

 

 

MODIS image of Lake of the Woods from Aqua satellite, April 12, 2024, in false colour.

The ice doesn’t look quite as weak as in the Sentinel 2 shot, but the two imaging systems are not directly comparable. They both use infra-red wavelengths and false colour, but not in exactly the same way.

I’d have more confidence about which image was more meaningful if there wasn’t so much cloud cover.

SIGNS OF SPRING:

• Ice on the shoreline in downtown Kenora all looked candled yesterday, so it should let go today.

The weather forecasts show that things will cool off next week, with some below-freezing temperatures at night, and daytime highs in the single digits. I don’t think that will bring the thaw to a stand-still, but it might mean a few days without dramatic progress. The fourteen day outlook shows a return to seasonable or slightly above average temperatures after that.

An average high for this time of year is nine or ten degrees Celsius. Yesterday, Kenora reached 14.7ºC.