The Global Lake and River Ice Phenology Database contains freeze and breakup dates and other ice cover descriptive data for 748 lakes and rivers. Of the 429 water bodies that have records longer than 19 years, 287 are in North America and 141 are in Eurasia; 170 have records longer than 50 years; and 28 longer than 100 years. A few have data prior to 1845. These data, from water bodies distributed throughout the Northern Hemisphere, allow analysis of broad spatial patterns as well as long-term temporal patterns.
The data set was prepared by the North Temperate Lakes Long-Term Ecological Research program at the Center for Limnology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from data submitted by participants in the Lake Ice Analysis Group (LIAG). LIAG is an international ad hoc group of scientists who participated in a 1996 workshop sponsored by the Center of Limnology, University of Wisconsin-Madison and the National Science Foundation Division of Environmental Biology (Long-Term Studies Program). The group would be happy to receive additional data on these lakes or rivers or others around the world for inclusion in the database.
NSIDC has developed a Web-based user interface to the database that allows users to search the database and retrieve data by the available parameters. The interface also includes a link to more general information about the lakes and rivers in the database. The output can be directed to a Web browser, a gzipped file, or a tab-separated ASCII text file.
Note: The term 'phenology' in the data set title refers to the seasonal phenomenon of the freezing and thawing of lake and river ice.