Lake Erie Secrets May Lie Out West

Monday, September 7, 2009
Topics: Environment
Download  RSS  Short URL  Share

Understanding the patterns in water levels in the Great Lakes is a concern for more than the environmental community. It's something that can cost the shipping industry considerable money, too. But predicting future water levels has long stymied scientists. One local professor has found the answer in an unlikely place. Ideastream®'s Rick Jackson reports.

Associate Professor Greg Wiles and his graduate students spent three years studying climatological relationships of Pacific Ocean water near Alaska with the water in Lake Erie. They employed a method pretty much unheard of…

WILES: “We use tree rings.”

The College of Wooster hosts a tree ring laboratory, and researching annual ring records helped investigators determine lake level fluctuations the past 250 years; what Wiles calls:

WILES: “A retro dictionary; a kind of looking into the past”.

They noticed a pattern in Lake Erie water levels that looked familiar. Wiles’ team began comparing tree ring records from the North Pacific to Midwest data - and found a very strong relationship.

Large scale climate changes in western waters were being replicated by similar weather patterns across the Midwest.

Grad student Anne Krawiec wrote a thesis and a paper on the phenomenon, detailing an 80 year cycle of shifting water levels, which Wiles says also proved lake levels here the last several decades are as high as they’ve ever been ...anytime in the last 250 years.

So… what’s the point?

WILES: “If the models can then look back in time 200 years ago and say lakes were high or low depending on what the climate was like then, then that information might be kinda used in these models. It just gives us a richer, longer, data base.”

....helping to predict what will happen to Lake Erie in the next few centuries - which is the project’s ultimate goal.

Additional Information

Science News article referencing Prof Wiles work
More on Professor Wiles