Reddit, UW team up to study climate change using Lake Mendota ice data

Researchers warn ice is indicative of warming

Christina Lorey by Christina Lorey

Courtesy Clean Lakes Alliance

Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison are getting help from the worldwide Reddit community to collect information about when and for how long Lake Mendota will freeze each winter. They say that data will help them see how drastically our climate is really changing.

While we’ve had our fair share of extreme temperature swings this winter (remember that -26 to 45 degree one a few weeks back?), researchers say monitoring lake ice is a more even record of temperatures from year to year.

That kind of data is now being plotted, studied, and archived in the “Data is Beautiful” subreddit, an online forum dedicated to visually representing information to reveal “hidden truths.”

UW professors say that what makes this interesting is that people think about different ways of showing data using animated graphs instead of just numbers. The visualizations reveal a concerning trend that scientists and researchers have known for decades: ice is disappearing on Lake Mendota. Now we know just how bad it’s become.

Over the past 150 years, we’ve had one month less of ice on the lakes

All 10 of the longest years happened before 1900. Seven of the shortest years happened in the last four decades, with the absolute shortest in 2002, when Lake Mendota froze for just 21 days.

You can find more of the Reddit discoveries here.

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